


Tatters

by Martha



Series: Tatters [3]
Category: Angel: the Series, Cthulhu Mythos - Lovecraft, Stargate SG-1, The Sentinel
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, First Time, M/M, Suspense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-10-26
Updated: 2005-02-13
Packaged: 2017-10-07 23:12:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 110,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/70249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Martha/pseuds/Martha





	1. Chapter 1

> Night fell and the hours dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the Pallid Mask.
> 
> Robert W. Chambers: "The Yellow Sign" (1895)

The elevator opened onto a long corridor lined with numbered doors. The carpet was plush enough to muffle any footsteps, and the wallpaper writhed with dark geometric flowers. The ornate wall sconces were so dim they seemed to be trying to swallow back the light, but after a flicker of hesitation, Jack stepped off the elevator anyway.

He didn't know this place.

The soles of his shoes sank in the carpet, and glancing down, he saw it was decorated with woven flowers like the ones on the wallpaper. Lush, tropical shades of burgundy and green, yellow and brown, luxuriant as weeds. If flowers like that had ever come up in his yard, he would have torn 'em up by roots and composted the whole lot of them.

Music was playing behind one of the closed doors. As Jack passed by, he heard the brassy blat of saxophones, then Ethel Merman's voice sounding tinny and distant through the walls.

_We're having a heat wave ... a tropical heat wave..._

Big, silly production number from a movie no one remembered anymore. He couldn't imagine the sort of person who could sit in the darkness of this gloomy place and listen to Irving Berlin tunes.

>   
>  _Gee, her anatomy  
> Makes the mercury  
> Rise to ninety-three  
> Yes, sir!_   
> 

Jack hurried down the dark hall, shoving his hands deep in the pockets of his leather jacket. He found something heavy in his right pocket and drew out a skeleton key with the number 636 stamped at the top. He looked at the numbers on the doors and discovered he was very close to the one this key would open. Finding it, he raised his hand to knock, then decided it was probably his own room. Sure enough, when he slipped the key into the lock, the door opened smoothly.

The blazing afternoon sun limned the heavy curtains over the windows in gold, but the room itself was heavy with shadows. Jack paused in the doorway, feeling along the wall for a light switch. He could just make out the shapes of furniture, chairs and a table, an alcove with a bed.

He heard the soft hush of a door opening somewhere down the corridor, and rather hurriedly shut his own door and locked himself in. He still hadn't found the light. Then he heard a snuffling noise and realized he wasn't alone in the room. He froze, back against the door, as someone sat up in his bed.

"Jack?"

A click, and pallid light spilled from a lamp on the bedside table. Daniel sat blinking sleepily at him.

"Daniel," Jack said as all his fears bled away. He did know this place after all. This was one of his happy dreams. "Didn't mean to wake you up."

Daniel raised an eyebrow at him and settled back against the pillows. "You could try making a little _more_ noise the next time you don't mean to wake somebody up," he complained in a voice still scratchy from sleep.

"Sorry."

Daniel smiled a small, secretive smile. As he turned and stretched up to switch off the lamp, the covers slipped down off his hip.

Jack dropped his jacket on the floor. The shirt followed, and then his shoes and socks, leaving a trail of clothing all the way to the bed. He pulled off his jeans and crawled into bed beside Daniel.

"Some of us are trying to sleep here," Daniel grumbled. He put his arms around Jack and kissed his mouth, and when Jack moaned, he began gently to rock against him until they were moving together in the darkness. Jack's dream self was a little vague on the mechanics, but it was sweet and warm, a delicious tension building between them as Daniel stuttered and sighed and Jack clung to him and whispered his name.

Suddenly Daniel went utterly still beneath him. "Daniel," Jack complained softly, wondering how he could possibly stop when everything felt so good, but Daniel hissed in impatience and put his hand over Jack's mouth.

"Hush," he whispered. "Do you hear that?"

Jack held his breath and listened. He did hear something, now that Daniel mentioned it. A voice. Dear God, was someone else in the room? And here he was naked in bed without so much as his M9 with him. Dammit, dammit, _dammit,_ he'd had an bad feeling about this place right from the start. He should have --

Jack relaxed. He knew that voice.

> She certainly can  
> Yes, sir!  
> She certainly can  
> She certainly can  
> She certainly can

Ethel Merman, still singing about the heat wave. The record was skipping. "Relax, Danny." Jack nuzzled his neck. "Just some guy down the hall wearing out his Irving Berlin Songbook."

"_Then why is it getting closer?_"

Jack rolled out of bed and landed silently on the balls of his feet. He edged towards the door, stopping to grab his jeans and hastily pull them on. The hallway light threw a dim yellow glow under the door. Though he couldn't be sure, he thought a shadow was blocking some of the light.

The shadow moved. He was right -- someone was standing outside. "Keep your head down," he whispered to Daniel. "Don't say anything. I'm going to --"

Instead of doing what he was told, Daniel turned on the lamp. Jack whirled back furiously, but his angry words died on his lips as he saw Daniel sitting naked and defenseless on the side of the bed. There was a book on the bedside table that Jack hadn't noticed before. He had no idea why he was noticing it now. The binding was pale yellow and looked very old.

"The king has opened his tattered mantle," Daniel said. "There's naught but Christ to cry to now."

"_What_?" Jack demanded, and then the door swung open and he awoke with a violent start.

Jack's heart was pounding so violently his chest ached. He was covered in sweat. For long moments he looked up at the ceiling, pale with the light of early dawn, and then he rolled over and slapped off the alarm clock with a shaking hand before the buzzer could go off. He was still breathing hard. OK, _not_ one of his happy dreams after all. Jesus.

* * *

The new plan was working out great. Six in the morning was definitely the time to hit the supermarket. Even half an hour later was no good, since that's when the third shift people started showing up -- and Blair knew from personal experience that life was just too short to get between an RN just off a sixteen hour shift and the last ripe avocado in the produce display. Any later in the day, the-stay-at-home parents began clogging the aisles with their children, and early evening was beyond hopeless. Two in the morning was pretty dead, but as Jim had pointed out, Blair had to sleep sometime.

So this was great. Juggling their new schedules was exhausting both of them, but Blair was managing things, and as he reclaimed his ATM card and pushed his cart out, he checked his watch and saw he'd made it from door to door in only twenty minutes. He grinned. New personal best.

The parking lot made the sky look wide open. The sun had come up, but gray clouds were piling across the horizon. It would probably be raining before noon. A homeless man sat huddled on the other side of bicycle rack near the front entrance, and he wordlessly held out his hand as Blair passed him. His palm was pudgy and too soft, the fingers as short and fat and widely spaced as the limbs on a starfish. Blair shuddered in quick revulsion, and then, immediately ashamed of himself, said, "I don't have any cash, man, but if you're hungry --" He rummaged in his grocery sacks until he found a bag of apples. He fished out two and handed them down.

The man looked up, and the shabby parka hood that had been covering his head fell back.

Blair didn't scream. He staggered, distantly hearing two little thumps as his proffered apples hit the pavement. He stumbled away without looking back, his knuckles white on the handle of his grocery cart. Fuzzy-headed and stupid with shock, he threw his bags in the back seat of the Volvo. He very nearly did scream when he carelessly flooded the engine while trying to start the car.

Stupid, stupid. He rested his forehead against the steering wheel and struggled to control his breathing. He was being an idiot. Maybe Jim was right and he needed to schedule more time for sleep, since he was apparently starting to hallucinate. Wasn't that an early symptom of severe sleep deprivation?

The face Blair had seen under the ragged hood had been dimpled and gray, and as featureless as a raw oyster.

It was too ridiculous, a wild over-reaction to a trick of the light. Or maybe the poor guy really did suffer from some kind of congenital defect, a skin condition or untreated facial cancer that looked worse that it really was in the uncertain morning light. Blair should go back and see if he needed anything.

He couldn't make himself do it. He even had the appalling thought that the homeless man might be shuffling up to his car right now, and at any second that dimpled void of a face would be thrust up against his window.

The engine started on the second try and Blair drove home without looking back.

He was still on edge by the time he parked across from the loft and dragged the groceries out of the back seat of the Volvo, but mostly he was feeling embarrassed. Apparently, not even Wonder-Blair could handle the increased teaching hours as a lecturer _and_ the longer hours as a consultant to the Cascade PD _and_ manage to be at Jim's side every shift without something threatening to give. When he started seeing monsters panhandling outside the Safeway, that was a pretty safe bet it was time to rethink his appointment book.

He didn't think Jim would even tell him, "I told you so."

Blair smiled to himself, juggling the grocery bags to push open the ground floor door. In fact, Jim was a pretty mellow guy all around these days.

Nevertheless, Blair was still shivering a little as he let himself in and dropped his grocery bags on the dining room table. It'd be a miracle if nothing had been broken, the way he'd been slinging those bags around. Jim appeared in his bathrobe, still flushed and damp from his shower.

"Hey, man."

"Hey yourself." Jim looked at him ruefully. "I told you I could do the shopping myself if you could wait until Thursday."

"I know. Next time I'll take you up on that."

Jim put his arm around Blair's neck, gently reeling him in to nuzzle his chin against Blair's temple. Then he abruptly let him go, planting both hands on Blair's shoulders and hauling him around to look him in the face. His eyes had lost their early morning softness.

"What happened to you?"

Blair shook his head. His panic attack in the parking lot must stink to high heaven. "Nothing. It was nothing. You think it's possible I've been maybe, uh, over-extending myself these past few months?"

Jim's eyes crinkled in amusement. "Slacker like you? Doesn't seem very likely, does it? "

"Oh, OK." Blair smiled back because he just couldn't help it. "Just checking."

* * *

"She started a heat wave," Jack muttered to himself, not quite singing as he poured coffee. "By letting her seat wave ..."

"Excuse me, Colonel?"

Carter was standing next to him with her own coffee cup. Jack snorted. He hadn't even realized that damn song was still going through his head. This is exactly why he didn't let himself think about the happy dreams while he was awake. Never knew what might come out of your mouth at the wrong moment. Apparently he needed to be just as careful about the not-so-happy dreams.

"Don't you kids listen to the classics anymore?"

"Oh, I know the song, sir." She held out her cup and Jack filled it. "Just didn't realize you were such an Ethel Merman fan."

"I didn't know _you_ were, Major." Jack was rather proud of his touchè, and Carter stopped trying to hide her smile.

"Not me, Dad. He loves those old musicals. Had all the records, everything. I wasn't sure who the Rolling Stones were when I started junior high, but I knew the entire libretto to _South Pacific_ by heart."

"Some enchanted evening..." Jack sang, very badly. "I wonder if he's introduced the Tok'ra to MGM musicals yet?"

"What are MGM musicals?" Teal'c asked. He took a seat and folded his hands on the conference room table.

"Ask Daniel." Jack sat down across from him and blew on his coffee. "Tell him you need to spend a long weekend watching Ester Williams movies in order to understand Tau'ri culture. I'm sure he'll be glad to oblige."

Teal'c raised a skeptical eyebrow. Damn. It was almost impossible to pull anything over on that Jaffa any more.

"Speaking of Daniel," Jack said suddenly, "Where is our blue-eyed archeologist this morning? Somebody want to call his office and see if he's lost track of the time?"

"That won't be necessary, Colonel." General Hammond entered, followed by Janet Fraiser and -- aw, _shit_\-- Dr. Mackenzie. "Dr. Jackson wasn't invited to this meeting."

"Is Daniel all right?" Carter asked immediately.

"He was just fine when I saw him yesterday," Jack said. "I'm sure he's just fine today. Of course, that's likely to change when he discovers people are having meetings about him behind his back." He glared at Mackenzie.

"Dr. Jackson is an intelligent, highly educated man--" Mackenzie started calmly.

"He's a freaking genius and you know it."

"--And so I'm sure he understands why the SGC has a legitimate interest in conducting periodic reviews of his work and overall health. Not just for his own good, but to ensure there is no repeat of last year's unfortunate events."

"It's been --" Jack had to count,"--four months since Daniel got back. He's fine. His work is excellent. I'm his commanding officer and I say there's no problem. Everybody happy? Good. Meeting adjourned."

He expected Hammond to slap him down like he deserved, but the general was sitting back and just watching this play out.

"Colonel," Janet said. "Daniel spent six months living out of his car while he researched medieval alchemy and occultism. It's not unreasonable for us to watch for any recurrence of irrational behaviors."

"Irrational?" Jack kept his voice level. "Do you have even one shred of evidence that Daniel's acting irrationally?"

Mackenzie picked up the large black book he'd brought into the conference room and leaned across the table to set it in front of Jack. "Do you recognize this, Colonel O'Neill?"

The book was sealed in a slick mylar sleeve for protection and was obviously very old. There was no title on the spine. Not, Jack suspected, that he would have been able to make much sense out of the title even if there had been one. "Any point in me taking this out of the wrapper and lookin' at the pages?"

"The text is in medieval Latin," Mackenzie said. "I had Dr. Singh translate a few pages for me and research the history of this volume."

"Any reason you didn't have Daniel do the translation?"

"For reasons that should be obvious to you, we needed a completely objective analysis."

"What's obvious to me is that you're undermining Daniel's authority by taking translation work directly to his subordinates. General, I can't believe you signed off on this."

"Please answer Dr. Mackenzie's question," Hammond said calmly. "Do you recognize or know anything about this book?"

Jack glanced at Carter for help, but it was clear she was as clueless as he was. "No," he said at last. "I don't recognize it. Any reason I should?"

"It's the _Liber Ivonis_," Mackenzie said with the air of a man who'd just won an argument. "Dr. Jackson invoked national security interests and had the Rainier University Library in Cascade Washington send it to him via special courier -- at considerable expense, I might add, given the volume's age and rarity."

"Danny's checking old books out of the library?" Jack asked, incredulous. "_That's_ your evidence?"

"The _Liber Ivonis_ is a special case. It purports to be a translation of the Book of Eibon."

"Oh, well, there you go. Book of Eibon. Why didn't you just say so in the first place?"

"The Book of Eibon supposedly was a grimoire transcribed by the fallen angels millennia before mankind."

"Uh. Huh."

"In other words," Mackenzie went on, finally showing some impatience, "The Book of Eibon never existed. The _Liber Ivonis_ is a fake. Useless to anyone but a bibliophile or historian specializing in medieval beliefs about alchemy and magic."

"All right, stop. Can we just hold everything right here for a moment?" Jack crossed his hands vigorously, palms out. "I'm tired of playing twenty questions. Would someone just explain to me exactly what it is Daniel's done that's got everyone so upset? Have his library books put the Stargate program over budget? What?"

"As I've already indicated, the book came from the Rainer University Library. That name should be familiar to you, Colonel O'Neill."

"I'm not an idiot. I know that's where we found Daniel, but so what? He spent several weeks there. He knows the library. If that's where the books he needs are, why shouldn't he get them?"

"Do you know why Dr. Jackson wanted this particular volume?"

"If I asked what he was doing every time Daniel picked up a book, I'd never get anything else done."

"Colonel," Janet interrupted. "The fact of the matter is four months after Daniel was supposedly cured of all effects of the Light, he's still researching the same occult texts he was obsessed with while he was on the run from the SGC."

"And you're drawing this conclusion based on one book?"

"No," Janet said sadly.

Mackenzie turned the page in his little notebook. "Since Dr. Jackson was reinstated to the program in mid-January, he's also obtained _Cultes des Goules_, Ludvig Prinn's _De Vermis Mysteriis_, von Junzt's _Unaussprechlicken Kulten_ and even John Dee's fragmentary translations from the _Al Azif_. The list goes on."

"And this is a list that's supposed to mean something to me?" Jack thought he did a pretty fair job of keeping his voice level, but his temples were pounding and he didn't know if he were angrier right now with Frasier and Mackenzie for backing him into this corner, or with Daniel for giving them the ammunition to do it.

"They're demonologies, Colonel," Mackenzie said. "Grimoires. Occult histories. Spellbooks. Magic. Incidentally, these are only the ones we know about because the books were so rare or fragile Dr. Jackson had to invoke special sanctions to obtain them in the first place. Our sources tell us that Dr. Jackson has been using his academic credentials to have several dozen more such volumes shipped through interlibrary loans to the University of Colorado's downtown campus."

Oh, Danny, Jack thought. What the hell are you playing at? "You've been spying on him," he said dully.

"So I'm afraid I have to agree with Dr. Mackenzie," Hammond said. "Dr. Jackson needs to provide a clear explanation of his newfound, er, field of interest. If he's unwilling or unable to do that, then I'm afraid it may be necessary to reevaluate his position with the program."

"With all due respect, sir," Carter interrupted, "But I think we could all be jumping the gun here. After all, knowledge of so called 'magical' practices have proven invaluable in the past." She looked at Jack for confirmation, and he nodded in agreement, hoping like heck she wasn't going to ask him for examples. "Daniel found Seth here on earth by tracing the history of occult groups associated with him."

"That's right, he did," Jack said, waving his finger at Mackenzie. "Took about twenty minutes online, didn't it?"

"Daniel Jackson's research into occult beliefs of ancient Egypt helped lead to the discovery of Kheb and the Harcesis child," Teal'c pointed out.

OK, not a one hundred percent positive example there, Jack thought, considering how things eventually turned out, but they were definitely on the right track.

"Look, the easiest thing is just to ask him, right? Sounds to me like Daniel realized the research he did while he was a little on the, um, obsessed side could also come in handy once he was back on the team. Just let me talk to him. I'm sure he'll have a reasonable explanation for everything."

"Thank you, Colonel," Hammond said gravely. "I sincerely hope you're right. So it's the considered opinion of you and the rest of SG-1 that Dr. Jackson's exposure to the Light and his subsequent decampment is no longer influencing his behavior in any way."

"Absolutely not, sir," Jack said. Carter and Teal's chimed in with their immediate agreement, God bless 'em.

"As I recall, Dr. Jackson recently strongly urged that SG-1 explore P3X-636," Mackenzie said. "You're equally certain that his insistence was in no way related to the Light or to the aliens who subsequently found him in Cascade?"

Jack schooled his face into absolute stone. God damn the man. What the hell had he heard about that planet? "I'm certain," Jack said flatly, knowing that Teal'c and Carter wouldn't have breathed a word about Daniel's nightmares their second night on that godforsaken dark planet on the other side of the galaxy, far less his febrile insistence that they continue their explorations, even after finding the temple with the open door --

"I'm absolutely certain," Jack repeated for emphasis. "May I be excused, sir?" He picked up the mylar covered book. "Apparently I've got some things to discuss with Daniel."

* * *

> 'Tis a thousand pitties, that we should permit our Eyes to be so Blood-shot with passions, as to loose the sight of many wonderful Things, wherein the Wisdom and Justice of God, would be Glorify'd ...
> 
>  _The Wonders of the Invisible World_, Cotton Mather, (1693)

"Hello, Blair!" Professor Sveadas waved vigorously to him from across the quadrangle. Blair stopped and waited for her to catch up even though he was running late for his eight-thirty class. Angeline Sveadas was in the classics department, the one non-anthropologist on his dissertation committee, and she'd been unfailingly supportive over the past three years in her own inimitably vague way. "However are you doing?" she called, still a distance away. "How's your sentinel?"

Blair couldn't help his flinch. It had been three, almost four months now, but these offhand references still gave him a shiver like someone had just walked over his grave. "Jim's fine," he said when Professor Sveadas was close enough that he didn't have to raise his voice.

"I'm so glad." Professor Sveadas took his arm and patted it reassuringly. She was almost a foot taller than him, with gray hair that she wore in a long braid over one shoulder and bird-bright eyes that winked out of a deeply lined face. "I know it wasn't an easy thing for him."

"I almost think it was almost harder for me. The decision to go public, I mean. After that mess with the Feds and the Air Force over Christmas Jim simply made up his mind, and I don't think he's ever looked back."

"Hard to believe our own government is that ruthless!" she declared. "Almost like something out of one of Dr. Kelso's thrillers, wasn't it?"

"Ah ... Jack Kelso's books are non-fiction," Blair said carefully, and Professor Sveadas looked at him like he was a nice enough boy, but a little stupid. It was the same expression she'd worn during much of his dissertation defense, and Blair had been sure she was going to fail him.

"Well, good heavens, of course they are," she said. "And it hasn't caused any problems for Detective Ellison at work?"

"Nothing he hasn't been able to handle. We were pretty worried about the legal issues, but there's no precedent for limiting the Plain Sight Doctrine to people with twenty-twenty vision. In fact, a couple of the D.A.s were a little annoyed that we hadn't fessed up earlier. Might have saved them a lot of man hours rechecking fact issues that Jim already knew."

'Little annoyed' was an understatement. Beverly Sanchez had just about bitten their heads off.

"Well I'm glad to hear it," Professor Sveadas said. She looked over Blair's head like a stork perusing the lake for frogs. "Must be going. So glad you're well." She picked her way off in the opposite direction, seeming satisfied with the anticlimactic end of the story.

Everything about the revelation of Jim's abilities had been anti-climactic. Naomi was still disappointed about the press conference. After Jim and Blair had unanimously vetoed all her spin ideas -- real life superhero with the Cascade PD! -- and anything beginning, "in the jungles of Peru" or that mentioned fighting for justice -- the print reporters and the couple of cameramen from the local TV stations who'd shown up were left with a story about a graduate student claiming to have found proof of a Victorian anthropologist's theory that no one had ever heard of in the first place.

Oh yeah, and a police detective with "heightened senses." Not, as it turned out, a phrase that resonated with anyone outside the professional secrets business. Jim made the late night news on Channel 11, and rated a single-column story on the second page of the "Lifestyle" section in the Cascade Sunday paper.

That morning Jim had looked at the story without bothering to read it, then passed it across the coffee table to him. "For your scrapbook, Chief."

Blair, on the other hand, suddenly felt like he'd fallen off a cliff. He held out his hand for the paper and saw his own fingers were trembling. "Jim," he said, letting the paper drop. A grainy black and white picture of Jim in dress blues illustrated the story. "Are you sure you're all right?"

"Me?" Jim looked at him, honestly puzzled. "For years now I've been imagining, I don't know what. That it would be like it was when I got back from Peru. Television lights in my face. Reporters calling my Dad. The whole world watching like I was some kind of a freak. And instead --" he gestured at the newspaper. "This is nothing." A grin broke over Jim's face that was pure sunshine. "It turns out nobody really gives a shit about me at all."

Blair should have been grinning back. He could never resist Jim's smiles. But instead his shakes were getting so bad he had to clamp his hands on his knees to keep himself from flying to pieces. "Well, there's still the academic press. The excerpts from my diss won't be published for another nine months or so, but --"

"Sandburg, I think I can handle a write-up in the Journal of Obscure Goobledygook."

"Yeah. I know you can. Of course." Blair had to look away.

"You disappointed that there's nobody knocking down our door to get the movie rights? No invitation to appear on Larry King -- nobody calling to say you won a MacArthur award?"

Blair stiffened, but there wasn't a trace of mockery in Jim's voice. God, was Jim was right? Was he really the kind of person who could be _disappointed_ that Jim's private life had not, after all, been destroyed in a blaze of publicity?

"Nah," he said, trying hard to keep his tone as light as Jim's. "The MacArthurs don't get announced until October."

"So there's still time." Jim was still smiling, so relaxed and happy that Blair blurted out what he hadn't even known until he said the words out loud.

"You know what's making me crazy here? We told the world about you, and nobody cared. I can't even begin to get that, man. I mean, Jesus, you're so wonderful and so beautiful, this human _miracle_. How could people just not give a shit?" Blair swept the newspaper off the table. "God, if it was me I'd do anything just to _see_ you, just to begin to understand --"

"Chief."

Blair suddenly realized he was crying. Dear God, he'd completely lost it. Jim must think he was nuts. He stumbled to his feet, trying to make his escape blind, but he stumbled smack into Jim instead, who put his arms around Blair and held him until he stopped trying to pull free, and then stroked his back until he'd stopped crying, too.

"Sorry," he muttered into Jim's shirt. "Sorry. I don't know what the hell's --"

"Wonderful?" Jim asked. "Beautiful?"

* * *

> The first Angell or Spirit of Saturn is called Orifiel, to whom God committed the government of the World from the beginning of its Creation; who began his government the 15 day of the moneth of March, in the first year of the World, and it endured 354 years and 4 moneths. Attributed to the Spirit in regard of his action: under his dominion men were rude, and did cohabite together in desert and uncouth places, after the homely manner of Beasts.  
> 
> 
> _De Septem Secundeis_, Johannes Trithemius (1508)

He found Daniel in his office, poring over an old book

"Hey."

"Hello, Jack," Daniel said without looking up.

"Brought you a present." He laid his offering on the desk next to the book Daniel was reading, stealing a look at the page as he did. It wasn't in English. Jack didn't even recognize the letters.

"A donut," Daniel said suspiciously. "What's going on?"

"What, I can't bring you a chocolate donut out of the goodness of my heart?"

Daniel sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. "Now I'm really worried."

Jack dumped the _Liber Ivonis_ on the desk. "Mackenzie's freaking out about your book of the month club. He thinks you're about to take off on another unannounced road trip."

Daniel tilted his chair forward and reached for the book. "Thanks for bringing this down. I was expecting it last week."

"Earth to Daniel." Jack scooted the book out of his reach. "Mackenzie thinks you're 'acting irrationally.' He's talking about pulling your credentials."

"Yes, and sometimes Mackenzie is a real ass."

"Not exactly disagreeing with you, but he's got Janet and Hammond listening to him. They're worried."

Daniel reached again for the _Liber Ivonis_, and when Jack continued to hold it out of reach, huffed in exasperation and said, "Do my ears look deformed to you?"

"Excuse me?"

Daniel turned his head and tugged on his right ear. "My ears. Would you call them deformed?"

"It's probably not the first word that would come to mind. Besides, your eyebrows are way stranger than your ears."

Said eyebrows went up. "Thanks, Jack. According to Dr. Mackenzie, my ears show the deformation typical of schizophrenia. It's in my medical records."

Jack shifted some papers to make room for himself to perch on the end of Daniel's desk, and made damned sure he didn't look or sound impatient. Obviously he was going to be here for a while. "Schizophrenics got deformed ears?"

"According to the DSM, schizophrenics as a group exhibit subtle malformations of the ear. Of course, the DSM also defines schizophrenia as psychotic and grossly disorganized behavior that persists for at least _six months_, but I guess Mackenzie overlooked that diagnostic criteria, given the incredibly compelling evidence of the shape of my earlobes. How long did he give me before writing me off? Was it even thirty-six hours?"

"I know," Jack said quietly. "I'm sorry."

Daniel looked up at him, his brows drawn together in a frown. "Jack. I don't -- It's been nearly two years. I'm not fishing around for an apology."

Jack shrugged. "Maybe you need to hear one anyway. I'm sorry I let them lock you up. I'm sorry I let them drug you."

Daniel squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I don't know why I even brought this up. I don't blame you. I don't even blame Mackenzie." He opened his eyes, and the expression he must have seen on Jack's face twisted a brief smile from him. "OK, so I do blame Mackenzie, but I don't hate the man. I mean, he listened to me in the end. He'd already made up his mind and thrown away the key, but when I asked him, he did call you."

He looked at Jack so earnestly that Jack had no idea what to say, so he flipped a paperclip across the desk at him in a companionable sort of way, and Daniel blocked it and flipped it back, and when Jack returned it a little too enthusiastically, it went sailing off the end of the desk.

Daniel reached down and picked it up. "All I'm saying is, given Dr. Mackenzie's track record, it's kind of hard for me to take anything he says about my mental health very seriously."

"You and me both, but he's got Janet all in a tizzy and she's gone to Hammond and gotten him worried too, and frankly, I'd appreciate your help in nipping this whole thing in the bud."

"Right. OK. So what's Mackenzie's problem?"

"He doesn't like the books you're reading. They scare him."

Daniel blinked. "They _scare_ him?"

Jack thumped on the _Liber Ivonis_. "He says this one was written by the angels who got kicked out heaven. Does he mean Satan? I probably need to remind him that we've already kicked Sokar's ass ourselves."

"Written by ... angels?" Daniel's brow furrowed. "Where in the world did he get an idea like that?"

"Uh, I think he asked someone," Jack hedged, hoping he wouldn't have to open that can of worms yet.

"Who? Dr. Singh? So that's why poor Nareej was so jumpy the other day. That man can translate circles around me when it comes to Dardic languages, but Renaissance esoterica isn't his field. Mackenzie should have just asked me if he wanted to know so badly."

"See, and that's exactly what I told him," Jack said triumphantly.

"Tradition has it that it was written by the great Hyperborean magician Eibon, but probably it's the work of an anonymous scribe writing sometime in the late Pliocene."

"Uh, I'm no geologist, but the late Pliocene? As in two-millions-years-ago Pliocene? I didn't realize we were doing a whole lot of bookkeeping as a species by that point. Weren't we still pretty much caught up in the whole walking upright scene?

"Well, the scribe wasn't _human_," Daniel said a little impatiently.

"Ah. Of course not. Goa'uld?" It gave Jack the creepy-crawlies, imagining the goa'uld mucking around in the childhood of mankind. "Were they using human hosts by then, or was it an Unas?"

Daniel reached for the _Liber Ivonis_ again and this time Jack let him have it. "The goa'uld have used a lot of beings for hosts," he said, running his long fingers along the slick mylar sleeve. "Not all of them were as tractable as humans."

"Hosts who fought back? Great. I like the sound of that."

"I'm not so sure," Daniel said.

"C'mon, how can that possibly be a bad thing?"

Daniel sighed. "Well, think about it. The religious history of mankind has been inextricably tainted by contact with the goa'uld."

Not really something Jack enjoyed thinking about, thank you very much, but he nodded cautiously so Daniel would keep talking.

"So what are we supposed to make of texts like these? I guess I shouldn't be surprised they scare Mackenzie. They've frightened the religious establishment ever since Gilamesh dedicated the House of An to Ishtar." Daniel peeled open the seal and the sharp scent of old paper and binding filled the room. "That makes a book like this a corruption of a corruption, doesn't it? "

"And the enemy of my enemy is my friend?" Jack said hopefully.

"I don't know," Daniel said. Jack looked at him, and wondered if Daniel was losing weight, or if it were only the sharp white light from the desk lamp that made his eyes look so shadowed. "So you'll tell Mackenzie that I'm just doing my job here? I'm trying to put together a history of the goa'uld as a species in the hopes of finding a weakness that will allow us to defeat them. Exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, right?"

"Yeah," Jack said slowly. "I'll tell him." He slid off Daniel's desk, thinking unhappily that for some reason he was more concerned about Daniel's research now than he'd been when he sauntered in here. He had gotten as far as the door when another uncomfortable thought struck him and he turned back. "Daniel?"

He glanced up. "Jack?"

"This doesn't have anything to do with all that weirdness on P3X-636, does it?"

Daniel looked away for a moment, and when he looked back Jack couldn't read the expression in his shadowed eyes.

* * *

> From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.
> 
> "The Shunned House" H.P. Lovecraft (1928)

Only in L.A., Gunn thought as he stepped off the elevator. Or Tucson. Maybe Denver or Phoenix. Or one of those old mining towns up in the Rockies that had been there for a hundred years, or down in Death Valley even, but nowhere back east. Chicago, D.C., Atlanta, any place like that, you leave a building to rot, and it rots, man. Mildew eats up the wallpaper, the rain bleeds in and takes the rafters, the carpet molds and floorboards go spongy with decay, and it doesn't take too long before a place like this would have the decency to fall down in a heap and fucking die already.

Not the Hyperion Hotel, though. Eighty-some years it had been here. For all the signs of age it showed, it would stand for at least eighty more. Carpet was looking a little scuffed was all, and apparently no one had been up here with a vacuum cleaner in a couple of decades. He squatted and looked at the pattern. He'd thought it was flowers, but from up close he saw it was really green and gold diamonds. Ugly either way. He almost thought he would've preferred flowers -- geometric shapes shouldn't writhe across the floor like that.

Gunn straightened up. Creepy ass old place. He preferred warehouses himself. Factory space. Industrial areas. A lot fewer lives to take into account in places like that, because how could you say how many people had spent nights behind each of these closed doors? How many had left a little piece of themselves behind? Gunn wasn't a man for ghost stories, but he knew damn well that the dead were always close to you, one way or another. Hanging out in a place like this was just inviting them to nuzzle a little bit closer, wasn't it?

Plus, all right, he had to admit, the Hyperion reminded him of the hotel in that old horror movie, the one where Jack Nicholson went running round chopping his way through doors with a fire axe. The twin girl ghosts had scared the piss out of him as a kid. It gave him a pang to think that he'd ever been innocent enough to be frightened by special-effects monsters, but it didn't make him like Angel's hotel any better.

He sauntered down the hall, rapping with his knuckles on the doors of empty rooms, daring anything to answer him. As he turned the corner, he thought he heard a sudden burst of music. Tinny, like somebody had an old record player. Probably just monster speakers in a car driving down Hollywood Boulevard, or hell, maybe it was the ghosts themselves, but either way, he'd had enough of exploring.

He took the stairs back to the lobby rather than waiting for the elevator.

Angel still wasn't back, and Wesley was still helping Cordelia with her lines.

"I knew no bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign." Wesley read solemnly.

Cordy scowled at him. "Could you be any more boring?"

"That's not your line."

"I know that's not my line. I meant, could you try to put a little more feeling into it? How am I supposed to find my character's center when you're reading that off like it's a state of the union address?"

English just raised an eyebrow above his glasses and read in exactly the same tone of voice as before, "I knew no bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign."

Cordy rolled her eyes. "Fine. If that's the way you're going to be."

"That's not your line either. Do you need me to give it to you?"

"For that last time, I know what my line is." She glared fiercely for a moment. "What is it again?"

"The king has --"

"Wait, wait," she made frantic gestures with her hands. "I've got it, I've got it." She drew herself up, raising her chin, and said, "The king has opened his shaggy robes --"

"It's a 'tattered mantle,' actually."

"Oh, good grief." She sagged back onto the lobby sofa. It occurred to Gunn that Angel must have gotten new furniture from somewhere -- no way was this stuff forty years old.

"I'm never going to learn this," Cordy complained. "Tattered mantle. Tattered mantle. Tattered mantle. It's not like it's easy to say."

"Admittedly, the line doesn't scan very smoothly," Wesley said.

"Oh, God," Cordy exclaimed, putting both hands on her forehead and falling sideways across the sofa as if she were having a seizure. Or a vision. "Don't go all English professor on me. Isn't the point of graduating never having to think about this stuff anymore?"

"Hey, it's not so bad," Gunn couldn't help it. "You just got to find the beat. Like, 'for the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabelle Lee.' Those are anapests. Da da dum, da da dum."

Cordy sat up and turned around. She and English were staring at him like he'd grown a second head.

"What? You all think I'm uneducated or something?"

Both of them blushed scarlet. Shootin' fish in a barrel, Gunn thought. He probably ought to be ashamed of himself. "Sorry. Go on with what you were doin'."

"Yes, of course," Wesley said, sitting up very straight. "The line is --"

"I've got it already. Feed me my cue."

"I knew no bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign."

"The king has opened his tattered mantle," Cordelia declaimed with all the feeling of your average department store mannequin. "There's naught but Christ to cry to now."

"That last part?" Gunn said. "Perfect iambs."

* * *

For some reason Jack's little visit this morning had shot Daniel's concentration all to hell. He took a sip of lukewarm coffee, grimaced, then bent over his book once more.

"_When they had covered half the way, covered half the way, a sickness befell him there, mind sickness befell him_," Daniel read for the third or fourth time. _"He jerked like a snake dragged by its head with a reed; his mouth bit the dust, like a gazelle caught in a snare. Neither king nor contingents could help him._"

Nothing.

He set aside his glasses and rubbed at his closed eyes with both palms. _Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave_ had been a long shot, and frankly, if he started spending all his time reviewing Sumerian resurrection stories, he'd never get anything else done. On the other hand, he had to pore through these ancient scraps of human consciousness, because with every re-transcription and re-translation a little more of what Daniel was looking for had inevitably been lost. Egyptian, Phoenician, Moabite, Aramaic and Greek -- every scholar in every succeeding civilization would have had fewer and fewer words with which to describe the utterly inhuman. By the time he got to a text as late as the fourteenth century _Liber Ivonis_, nothing but ghosts and shadows remained.

He slid his glasses back onto his face with a sense of resignation. Not that it made much difference -- his friend there on the other side of the room was equally clear whether or not Daniel was wearing his glasses. He might almost have passed for an airman slouching in the corner enjoying a cigarette break, at least until you noticed the soft, fat fingers, shockingly white against raggedy, nondescript khaki.

His face was far worse.

Daniel took a few deep breaths and thought very hard about happy, ordinary things. Meditating with Teal'c as the scent of hot beeswax filled his head. (The man must be spending his entire salary buying those cathedral candles.) Sam excitedly telling him over lunch the other day all about her plans to bike to Monument Valley next winter -- complete with MapQwest printouts and motel guides that she kept getting jello on.

Jack bringing him a stale chocolate donut from the commissary this morning.

When Daniel dared to raise his eyes again, his friend was gone for the moment. He could usually make him disappear by concentrating, but frankly, it didn't really help. The memory was almost worse than his presence.

Daniel had never been a finicky eater, but he was quite, quite certain that he'd never be able to eat oysters on the half shell again.


	2. Chapter 2

> Behold, I will send and take all the families of the north, saith the Lord, and Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and will bring them against this land, and against the inhabitants thereof, and against all these nations round about, and will utterly destroy them, and make them an astonishment, and an hissing, and perpetual desolations. Moreover I will take from them the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones, and the light of the candle.
> 
> Jeremiah 25:9-10

  


* * *

To Blair's relief, Jim was right on time, driving around to the front of Hargrove just as he pushed his way out the front doors. Blair had been feeling a little tired and run down by the end of class, and he supposed it must have been obvious to his students as well, the way their expressions became increasingly slack and uninterested the more Blair had struggled to keep his lecture on track.

More sleep, that was the ticket. He definitely needed to be showing up for his lectures completely rested after a good night's sleep. This wasn't fair to his students, sleepwalking his way through class. As the kids had wound their lackluster way out of the lecture hall he'd even felt the ugly niggling of dark self-doubt. Here he finally had everything he'd ever wanted -- more than he'd ever allowed himself to imagine, really -- was it finally going to turn out that he just couldn't do it? Had he been lying to himself and everyone else all these years?

And then with the sight of Jim's blue and white truck, suddenly everything shifted back into proper perspective. He was tired and had been a little off his game ever since his trip to the grocery store this morning, that was all. It didn't mean the world was coming to an end.

He ran down the steps swung his way into the truck. "Thanks for the lift," he said, pulling the door shut. "Your day been all right?" He broke off at the expression on Jim's face. "What's the matter?"

"Who was that guy you walked out with?"

"I don't know." Blair glanced over his shoulder. "Student, I guess. What'd he look like?"

"He was right next to you, and he looked -- I thought he was saying something to you but I couldn't make it out."

"Seriously I don't know. Whoever he was, I didn't notice." Blair scanned the students strolling across the lawn and wide brick walks.

"Nobody was talking to you?"

"No." He turned back to Jim. "Maybe one of my students was bitching me out under his breath for giving such a half-assed lecture today."

Jim's answering smile was a little weak. "Yeah, maybe." He finally put the truck in gear and pulled away from the curb, but Blair noticed he was still watching his surroundings with extra care.

"So what about this guy? Did he look really pissed off or what?"

"Nothing. I don't know. It's been a bad morning."

"Aw geez, man, what's going on? I thought you were going to be at the station."

"Didn't turn out that way. Everybody's been short-handed since midnight, and I ended up stopping on a domestic call right after I dropped you off this morning."

"Bad?"

Jim shrugged. Really bad, Blair translated. He rubbed the back of his hand against Jim's upper arm. "You OK?"

"I'm fine," Jim said, a touch impatiently. At the stoplight he closed his eyes for a moment before confessing, "It was over in Tacoma Heights. Nobody in the house spoke English, the patrolman who was first on the scene was totally out of his depth, we couldn't find a translator --"

"Kurdish family?"

"Yeah."

"Man, I've got to talk to Simon about arranging for me to run an orientation up at the 8th Precinct. The newer refugees are all PUK, and that's got to be causing tensions with the KDP families who're already there."

"The thing this morning didn't have anything to do with political affiliations, Chief."

"Well, it might not have been obvious to you, but we're talking about a very deep-seated and bloody history. It's not like Democrats and Republicans. Not at the end of the 20th century, anyway."

"You're telling me _politics_ would make a woman go after her own children like that?"

"I don't know," Blair said, keeping his voice calm. "How bad was it? Did she ... kill them?"

"They'll be OK. Physically, at least. Her husband stopped her in time."

"I'm surprised he called the cops. Not exactly the first thing I'd expect."

"Neighbor called." Jim was staring straight ahead, his face bleak. "The mother seemed real calm, even with the blood still on her hands and face, and she kept trying to, I don't know, explain something. Why she'd done it, maybe, but the neighbor refused to translate for us. Seemed pretty clear it was a psych case but Valley View was full up and Erlanger and Memorial didn't want to take her so we spent the rest of the morning just trying to find some place to put her, and then when the translator from the resettlement center finally showed up, she said the mother is talking about the coming of the 'king of rags and tatters.' That mean anything to you? Some kind of _political_ slogan?"

Blair didn't get angry. "No. I don't think so, anyway. What did the translator think?"

"She didn't think anything. Or if she did, she didn't tell us about it." Jim lapsed into silence, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

"Is there anything I can do?" Blair asked quietly. "Maybe talk to the people at the resettlement center and see if anyone knows more about the family?"

"Thanks." Jim glanced at him, his expression softening. "They're handling it up at the 8th from here on out. I already told Michelson to give you a call if they needed help."

No wonder Jim was so stressed. Called in on a bloody mess of a case, and then having it almost immediately taken out of his hands like that. No closure, no chance to make any sense from a sudden, chaotic explosion of violence and hurt.

Enough cases like that, you probably started to think that nothing made sense anymore.

"You want to grab some lunch before we go back to the station?" Jim asked suddenly

"Sure," Blair said, a little surprised. "Wonderburger?"

"Nah, I'm in the mood for sashimi. Haru work for you?"

Whoa. "Oh yeah, that sounds great. Especially if you're buying."

"No problem." Jim took a deep breath, clearly making an effort to put the morning and the case behind him. "But what happened to all that bragging about bringing in two paychecks these days?"

"Hey, I bought the groceries this morning and besides, contrary to popular belief, two part-time jobs don't really equal one full time job. And actually, we do have all that fresh produce in the fridge. You want to run home, have a salad for lunch instead?"

Jim laid his warm hand on Blair's thigh for a moment, stroking down to his knee and back. "Probably not a good idea." He turned to look at Blair at the traffic light. His raised eyebrow was probably supposed to be a leer, but the effect was spoiled by a half-shy smile that made Blair grin helplessly back at him. "We go home now and neither one of us will get any lunch."

* * *

This time Jack knew where he was.

Or if he didn't know exactly where he was, at least he was certain he had been here before. He recognized the carpet, the wallpaper, the tinny sound of a phonograph playing behind one of the closed doors.

He stepped off the elevator without hesitation. The room numbers were engraved on little brass plates, and he had a key to one of the rooms, he remembered that too. He fished around in his pockets looking for it. Daniel was already there. Jack remembered that most of all. He'd fallen asleep while waiting for Jack, but he wouldn't mind when Jack woke him up, even though he'd pretend to grumble.

Dammit, what had he done with the key?

Jack tried all his pockets again. He had a vague memory of leaving in a hurry last time. Something had happened, though he couldn't exactly remember what. Maybe he'd left his key behind.

He walked more slowly, dragging his feet through the heavy carpet as he examined the room numbers. Daniel would let him in if he knocked. All he had to do was remember the number, but the damned music was distracting him.

> It isn't surprisin'  
> The temperature's risin'  
> She certainly can can-can

Jack felt a hot prickle of dread begin to creep over his scalp. Something wasn't right here.

None of the room numbers looked familiar. The corridor dead-ended into a another long hallway, and Jack looked right and left even though he knew his room hadn't been this far down. Identical doors lined the intersecting hall. The windows at each end were draped in heavy velvet curtains. It had been midday the last time Jack was here, and though no light could have made it through those draperies either way, he was convinced it was nighttime now. He was tempted to run to the end of the hall just to be certain, but he had a sick suspicion that there might be no window there at all. If he twitched the curtain aside to find only more blank, wallpapered wall, he didn't know what he might do. Something very stupid, probably, and somewhere behind one of these identical doors Daniel lay sleeping with the covers pulled up to his chin. Utterly defenseless, trusting Jack would find him soon.

Jack went through all his pockets again, and on the verge of despair, his fingers finally touched the heavy brass skeleton key tucked deep into his hip pocket. He dragged it out in triumph and held it up to read the numbers by the lousy light of the wall sconces.

P3X-636.

OK, that was right, he thought, recognizing the room number. Wondering why he still felt so uneasy, Jack hurried down the corridor until he found the door, and slipped the key into the lock.

Immediately he heard a heavy _thunk_ as the last chevron fell into place. He stepped aside just before the blue splash of the event horizon spilled into the hallway and then rushed away like the sea at low tide. Cutting it a little close there, Jack thought, and stepped through the door.

He found himself on a beach at the edge of a ruined city. As far as the eye could see were broken towers and crumbling walls. A swollen reddish sun burned high in a dark sky, and the atmosphere was so thin he could feel the sun's heat even though the air was very cold.

With a gasp, Jack sat bolt upright in bed, fumbling frantically for the bedside lamp. When he turned the lamp switch, a moment of brilliant light blazed and then with a tiny, sharp snick the bulb burnt out, leaving him in darkness.

He swung his feet around and set them on the floor, waiting for the bright explosions of light to stop spotting his vision, for his heart to stop pounding in his chest.

P3X-636, dammit. Dammit all to hell.

When the phone rang, he nearly jumped out of his skin. He fumbled for the handset in worse than total darkness, still blinded from the light bulb, snatched the phone up at last and barked, "O'Neill."

"Hey, Jack. It's Daniel."

Jack fell backwards on the bed, not entirely admitting to himself just how good it was to hear his voice. "Christ, Danny, do you know what time it is?"

"Um, no. Let me check." A moment of scuffling around. "Looks like it's about 3:20. Oh-three-twenty," he corrected himself. "Were you sleeping?"

Deep breaths. Jack could feel sweat drying on his skin. "Yes, I was sleeping. Where the hell are you? Are you all right?"

"I'm at the mountain. Of course I'm all right. Why wouldn't I be?"

Jack counted silently to ten. "Is there some reason you're not home in bed?"

He heard Daniel exhale wearily. The sort of noise he made when Jack was asking a question too ridiculous to require an answer. "Look, something's come up and I need you to authorize travel arrangements for me."

"Travel arrangements."

"Right. I'm going to L.A."

* * *

> "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."
> 
> H.P. Lovecraft (1926)

* * *

Daniel was the one who had supplied the coordinates to P3X-636

Well, the coordinates themselves had come from the Abydos cartouche, and in the normal course of events it would have been months or even years before anyone got around to dialing them. But Daniel had asked, and although Jack supposed he had made a formal request with enough exhibits and footnotes to keep the bean-counters at the Pentagon happy, he hadn't bothered to read it himself. This was _Daniel_ after all. He might be a little flaky some days; he even might have spent six months roaming around the country in a battered blue Honda after a particularly severe flake-out, but c'mon. When Daniel Jackson said his research suggested dialing those coordinates sooner rather than later, well, then, you got off your ass and dialed the damned coordinates.

He _had_ kind of assumed that Carter at least would have read through Daniel's request. When they got their first peek at the MALP images though, she seemed just as taken aback as the rest of them.

"Oh, my," she breathed.

Jack took one look and immediately hoped the atmosphere was methane, or the temperature at the surface several thousand degrees above or below zero, or the whole planet in the path of a meteor or _something._ Anything to prevent them from ever having to step through that stargate.

Even Teal'c seemed faintly unsettled.

Daniel on the other hand leaned forward across the table to get a closer look at the screen. "Incredible," he said. "Can we get a better sense of scale?"

"We'll send a UAV through first, of course, and we could triangulate the size of some of the closer ruins." Carter tapped on the screen with the end of her pen. "Like what's left of this tower here."

"I don't think that's a tower," Daniel said. "I think it's just one pier. See how the line of rubble stretches back to the horizon? It must have been part of the same colonnade. We're looking at the remains of a single building here."

Carter sounded skeptical. "If you're right, I can't imagine what kind of a species would build to that scale. No one we've ever heard of."

"The goa'uld knew about them."

Teal'c's head swung around in surprise at Daniel's assertion.

"I'm not sure of the timeline, but it was probably around two million years ago, give or take a few hundred thousand. Back when goa'uld larvae were still growing to maturity in duck ponds. Probably well before they started taking human hosts at all."

"I have no knowledge of this species," Teal'c said.

"No. No, you probably wouldn't. The goa'uld would hardly be likely to tell their Jaffa they once worshipped the builders of this city as gods."

"Excuse me?" Jack sputtered, almost choking on his coffee.

"I can't prove it, of course, but there are scattered references ... Teal'c, you remember, on P4X-347, the script on the walls in that goa'uld dialect that was so difficult to read."

Jack cocked a worried eyebrow at Sam, even though he thought he already knew the answer.

"Yes sir," she said quietly, without his having to ask. "The planet where we found the Light.

Jack rested his head in his hands. Oh, great. Just great.

"I think this city was sacred to the species the goa'uld remember as the Old Ones. Racial memory, anyway. As far as we know, none of the system lords are old enough to have any direct memory of this city or the Old Ones themselves."

"Didn't live there?" Jack asked without looking up.

"Who, the Old Ones? Um, no. I gather they didn't really ... live in cities. Slept beneath them, sometimes.... What I've been able to put together so far is pretty fragmentary."

Jack raised his head, but before he could ask the next logical question Daniel continued hopefully, "So if we get the UAV launched by this afternoon, we can head out first thing in the morning?"

He sounded like he was planning a picnic. Jack scrubbed his hand over his face. "No, we cannot 'head out first thing in the morning.'" He pointed to the screen. "For one thing, I'd like a lot more information about this place before we go bebopping through the stargate."

After a moment of silence, Jack, realized everyone was looking at him. Right, right. That's exactly what this little meeting was about -- determining whether the destination held sufficient interest and was safe enough to justify the trip. "I mean, the atmosphere is probably poisonous. Or something."

"Actually sir," Carter began, but in his eagerness Daniel talked right over her. "The air's a little thin -- the planet's dying, and the atmosphere is bleeding off into space -- but it's perfectly breathable. We can carry oxygen if we need it. It's not a problem."

"Carter?" Jack asked pointedly.

She shrugged. "He's more or less right, sir. There are no obvious contraindications."

How about the fact that the place creeped him the hell out?

"Do we really want anything to do with creatures that the _goa'uld_ looked up to? Doesn't that make them several orders of magnitude worse than the goa'uld themselves?"

"It's been two million years," Daniel said mildly.

Even Hammond chimed in, at which point Jack realized the battle had already been lost. "Sounds to me, Colonel, like it could be to our advantage to learn whatever we can about a species that the goa'uld once feared enough to worship."

"I'll have my final recommendation to you after we've had a chance to review the UAV tape," Jack said in defeat, and by 0700 the following morning, the wormhole was spitting SG-1 out onto the beach of a red and dying planet.

It was a rough landing. Jack spun out of the wormhole dizzy and nauseated, stumbled hard and promptly fell off the platform and onto wet sand that felt solid as asphalt. He swore and lurched to his feet, trying to shake out the sharp pain in his left elbow, and turned to see the status of the rest of his team. Teal'c was helping Carter up on the other side. Daniel alone hadn't fallen off the platform, but he was on his hands and knees, his head down like he was about to be sick. "Daniel?"

"'m OK," he mumbled. "Just need a minute here."

Jack turned around slowly, taking his first reconnaissance of this godforsaken place. The ocean was gray and reeked of salt. The beach was as gray as the water, and the waves that poured across the sand were sluggish and grasping, leaving dirty foam hieroglyphs scrawled in their wake.

He wouldn't be recommending this as a summer vacation spot any time soon, that was for damned sure.

With a half-sick feeling of reluctance, he turned on his heel to look at the ruins behind them. The remote images had been bad enough.

Broken stone blocks the size of five-story buildings lay tumbled across the landscape as far as the eye could see. He traced the jagged outline of a stone in the near distance, and the sky began to tilt. With a grunt of surprise Jack suddenly found himself sprawled on the sand again.

"Careful, sir," Carter called out, her warning a little late. "It'll help the vertigo if you just focus on the horizon."

"What the hell's going on?" Jack demanded, but he took her advice, staring determinedly oceanward until his stomach had stopped turning flipflops.

"It's all right, Jack," Daniel insisted unconvincingly as he staggered to his feet. "There's something about the size of these ruins and the carvings on them --- some of the angles -- it's just an optical illusion. Screws with our balance. We should be OK as soon as we adjust."

He shuffled his way carefully off the platform, and then, apparently noticing Jack's skeptical expression, he turned stubbornly to the ruins. Jack was too far away to catch him when Daniel suddenly reeled sideways and hit the sand hard.

"Dammit, Daniel --"

"I'm OK," he said, pushing himself up. "Just need to adjust," he added before promptly throwing up his morning cup of coffee.

"Yeah, I can see that," Jack said, not entirely without sympathy, as Daniel scooted away from the mess on the sand and fumbled for his canteen. "Carter, as soon as you can do it without falling over or getting sick, dial us home."

"Jack, you can't," Daniel complained weakly, and Carter, for unfathomable reasons, took his side.

"Daniel's right. I really think we can handle this if you'll give us a little more time. It's just the scale and maybe the low oxygen levels in the atmosphere and that rough ride through the wormhole. I'm sure the vertigo is temporary."

"Told you this planet was no goddammed good," Jack grumbled. Teal'c was the only one who didn't look at him in some surprise. "Well if I didn't say it out loud, I was thinking it. You've got ten minutes, Major. If we can't stand up by then, we're so, so very out of here."

Unfortunately, though, it turned out Carter and Daniel were right. Within a few minutes Jack found himself able to look steadily at the messed-up horizon of rubble without having to fight the urge to puke. Everything about this place still made his flesh creep, from the sluggish ocean behind him to the sickly red sun wheeling so low in the sky. And especially the ruins themselves. He felt as though they were standing on the edge of an impossibly vast graveyard, and he had the unsettling conviction that not everything buried here was completely dead.

Rather against his better judgment, Jack found himself authorizing the attempt to complete their mission on this planet just the same.

Daniel seemed so certain, after all.

* * *

> When in the height heaven was not named,  
> And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name ...  
> And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;  
> When of the gods none had been called into being,  
> And none bore a name, and no destinies were ordained  
> Then were created the gods in the midst of heaven.
> 
> Enuma Elish (1902 King Translation)

* * *

Fifteen kilometers inland the UAV tapes had revealed a structure which seemed intact. That was their destination. If it had been a straight shot they probably could have been in and out before nightfall, but of course, every step of the way demanded they navigate over or through crazy broken landscapes, and once they lost sight of the ocean, there was nothing to steady the impossible angles zigzagging against the sky.

The air was bitterly cold, but when they emerged briefly from the shadows of ruins, the sun burned like a fever. The only signs of life were occasional flakes of lichen at the base of the stones.

Though Jack had been hoping to find a less claustrophobic place to sleep, that first evening they were forced to make camp in a narrow canyon between building stones the size of small mountains. The shadows were blue-black in the twilight, and the jagged slash of sky visible far overhead turned red as they pitched tents and ate their MREs in silence. Daniel started to gripe about Jack pushing the pace too hard for him to adequately record their surroundings, but his heart clearly wasn't in his complaint, and frankly, Jack was sorry when he fell silent again. The familiar background noise of Daniel bitching about things no one could change was infinitely preferable to the weight of silence in this Cyclopean graveyard.

A wind came up at sunset, moaning its way through the alley between the ruins, and making Jack decide he rather missed the silence after all. For more than an hour they sat outside their tents, which were pathetically small and fragile-looking scraps of human civilization against the walls of blackness. No one was in a hurry to go to bed, but no one had much to talk about, either. He and Carter wore oxygen masks for a while to counteract the effects of a difficult hike in such thin air. Teal'c didn't need the extra oxygen, and Daniel grouched that the dryness of the air in the tank aggravated his sinuses. When Jack insisted, he promised he'd wear it tomorrow if he felt himself getting fatigued.

Afterwards, that was the excuse Jack needed to blame the worst of it on hypoxia.

Jack thought he would have trouble falling asleep that night, but he must have dropped off as soon as he lay down, because he remembered nothing until he awoke to find Daniel shaking his shoulder and whispering, "Jack! C'mon, you've got to see this."

"Wha--?" It was a difficult climb back to wakefulness, despite the urgency in Daniel's voice.

"Dammit, Jack, come on!"

"I'm awake," Jack said, not precisely lying. He fought his way clumsily free of the sleeping bag. God, he felt like he'd been drugged. "Wha's the matter? Carter and Teal'c OK?"

"They're fine. I want you to see this. The moon's come up."

"You're getting me up for a moonrise?" Jack grumbled, and then he finally remembered where he was. Suddenly wide awake, he crawled out of the tent after Daniel as quickly as he could.

"Look," Daniel said, pointing upward.

There were no stars, just a jagged piece of crescent moon the color of butter. Sickly yellow light streamed over the jumbled ruins. Jack had been aware of the markings on the stones during the day, but had assumed they were striations in the rock or marks left from quarrying.

In the pallid moonlight, though, the subject of the carvings was inescapably clear.

"Jesus," he muttered, and instinctively reached for Daniel, knotting his fist in the sleeve of his BDUs.

Carter crawled out of the tent. "Is everything --" her voice trailed off as she glanced up.

"Is that -- is that what they looked like?" Jack thought their voices sounded dangerously loud, echoing through the gargantuan bones of this city. The moaning wind of sunset had long been silenced.

"I don't know," Daniel said at first. Then he admitted, "Maybe. As well as they could be represented by intaglio carving in stone at any rate."

"God," Carter choked.

"God is right," Daniel said. "You know, we've always wanted to assume the goa'uld corrupted human religion for their own purposes. But maybe it's the other way around. Maybe the goa'uld remembered their own veneration of the Old Ones." He waved vaguely upward, where the engraved figures seemed to writhe in the moonlight like viscera uncoiling from a battlefield wound. "They could have nudged human evolution along a little, hardwired into our genetic code an ability to experience the numinous. Maybe the reason human beings almost universally practice religion is because the goa'uld made us that way. "

No one answered him for a long time. Jack tasted bile at the back of his throat, and had to look away from the carvings so far overhead. There were probably similar figures cut into the rocks here at eye level, but those were too close for him to see anything but random lines, comfortingly meaningless. Or so Jack could pretend.

"That is not a pleasant hypothesis," Teal'c announced at last, in what had to be the understatement of the millennium. Jack hadn't even realized he had come out of the tent.

"We'll have to send a UAV in to get pictures of this when we get home," Daniel said. Jack saw Carter's head whip around, and she stared at Daniel as though she'd never seen the man before in her life. "I know I can't get any decent shots from the ground."

_No wonder they kicked you out of academia, Danny boy_. Jack's mind was still scrabbling over Daniel's new horrors the same way he'd scrabbled through the ruins all day. _Not because your theories are so crazy, but because you scare the _shit_ out of people._

Carter said quietly, her voice under iron control, "I'm going back to bed, sir. As long as you're still taking the next watch."

"Of course I'm taking it. Your paper covered my rock fair and square."

"Yes, sir." She and Teal'c both disappeared back into their tent.

"You too, Daniel." He was still looking upward, but the slice of sky visible above the canyon-like walls was so narrow the moon was almost gone. "We've got a long way to go tomorrow. Take a hit of oxygen while you're at it. Make you feel better."

"I feel fine," Daniel argued by rote, but he obediently turned towards the tent. In a sudden weird flash of insight, Jack thought that being Daniel Jackson must be a lot like seeing pictures all the time, when everyone around you only saw chicken scratchings on the rock.

How fucking lonely that must be.

"Daniel," he said quietly.

He turned around. "Jack?"

"Do me a favor, and be careful how you word your report, would you?"

A short, bitter laugh. "Don't worry. "

"Dammit, that's not what I meant," Jack said, except he supposed it probably was. He just didn't know what to say and couldn't stand the idea of Daniel stumbling off to his sleeping bag, believing that he lived in a universe so bleak that human spirituality was just a goa'uld-induced perversion. "C'mere."

After a moment of hesitation Daniel came back. Jack shook his head at him, and as the moon finally moved past their narrow horizon, Jack put his arms around Daniel's shoulders and pulled him in. Daniel made a little sound deep in his throat, and though he didn't hug Jack in turn, he relaxed against him without resistance, laying his forehead against Jack's neck, wrapping his fists in the shoulders of Jack's coat. His body felt warm and solid and good, sheltering Jack from the soul-deep cold of this planet.

"Is it just me, or does this place make a person nostalgic for Netu?" Jack finally muttered into Daniel's hair, because he couldn't stand here holding him all night, no matter how good it felt.

He was rewarded with a little grunt of laugher.

"Go to bed, Daniel." He patted his back, and Daniel uncurled his fists from Jack's coat. "Try to get some sleep."

* * *

> The familiar he had was called Malchi, (be my king,) a word in Hebrew of an unknown signification. After this they appeared faster than he desired, and in most dismal shapes ...which did very much affright him, and the more when he found it not in his power to stay them, insomuch that his hair (as he told me) stood upright, and he expected every moment to be torn in pieces; this happened in December about midnight, when he continued there in a sweat till break of day, and then they left him, and from that time he was never well as long as he lived.
> 
> Letter sent to the Bishop of Gloucester, by the Reverend Mr. Arthur Bedford, Minister of Temple Church, in Bristol. August 2d, 1703.

* * *

The next day was worse. Carter and Teal'c were both subdued, and even Daniel didn't have much to say. As they continued to travel inland, they began to encounter fragments of walls and columns that hadn't been completely reduced to their component building blocks. They even found a stretch of roadway. Each paving stone was the size of a city block, and they made good time until the boulevard finally dead-ended into a long, high mound of half-shattered stones. It looked as though a single unimaginably tall tower had suddenly tumbled sideways.

The barrier stretched as far as Jack could see in both directions.

"We'll have to climb over," Daniel announced. "The building we saw on the UAV tape is only a few kilometers past this."

"Whoa, not so fast." Jack slid his backpack off his shoulders and stretched his aching muscles. The plan had been to reach their destination by mid afternoon at the latest, then turn around and start for home first thing in the morning. It would take them the rest of the day just to climb this heap of rubble, assuming they could manage it in the first place. It would be difficult and exhausting, possibly dangerous, use resources they really couldn't spare and put them significantly behind schedule. "What do you think, Teal'c? Can we make a climb like that before sunset?"

Teal'c paced back and forth, looking up at the barrier and considering. "Although you, Major Carter and Daniel Jackson are all showing significant signs of fatigue, I believe we would reach the summit in two hours. I cannot know, of course, whether conditions on the other side would hinder our descent, or, indeed, perhaps even render it impossible."

"I'm not fatigued," Daniel protested, sure sign that he was pretty damned tired since he didn't recognize the futility of arguing with Teal'c.

"My decision, Daniel," Jack said mildly. "Take five."

Daniel glared at him for a moment, but then his eyes cut away as if he were watching someone behind Jack. Jack turned his head to see, even though he already knew no one was there. It was just an annoying mannerism Daniel had picked up somewhere along the way. Not entirely surprising that the man had developed a nervous tic after six months on the run, but it was unsettling at the best of times, and downright nerve-wracking on this planet. "And knock that off, would you?"

He hoped Daniel would protest that he had no idea what Jack was talking about, but Daniel only looked vaguely guilty before stomping off to pull out his camcorder.

Dammit. This place was giving everyone the willies.

"Carter? How do you feel about pushing on?"

She smiled tightly. "Honestly, sir? I'd like nothing better right about now than a hot bubble bath, but the builders of this city are unlike any race we've ever encountered. Seems a shame not to see at least one intact piece of their architecture while we're here."

"Yeah," Jack grumbled unhappily. "That's what I was afraid of."

The climb took closer to three hours than two. The thin atmosphere was affecting them all; despite Junior's help, even Teal'c seemed slower than usual. Jack watched the position of the sun and hoped like hell they would be able to get down the other side without too much trouble. The last thing they needed was to find themselves stranded halfway down the side of an artificial mountain when darkness fell.

The shattered surfaces of the stones they were climbing were deeply grooved and rutted, as though from the depredations of rain and weather. Jack suspected darkly the stones had actually been engraved, and that they were climbing over pictures like the ones they had seen last night in the moonlight. Ants crawling up the face of an alien Mount Rushmore. He didn't ask Daniel to confirm his suspicions.

And then he had cleared the summit, and Teal'c grabbed his arm when he staggered. "Please use caution, O'Neill." Carter was sitting down on the canted surface of the stone, her arms firmly planted on both sides like she might go tumbling off if her attention wavered, and Daniel was sprawled flat on his stomach. He looked as though he didn't trust the stability of the rock any more than she did.

It didn't take Jack long to decide to follow their example. Closing his eyes to shut out the sight of what loomed on the other side of the summit, he held onto Teal'c and gently lowered himself to the ground. It wasn't until he felt the solidity of cold stone under his butt that he risked opening his eyes again.

"Thought you said this place was still kilometers away," he croaked.

"It is," Carter said. "Four or five at least. It looks closer than that because it's so darn big."

Jack forced himself to chuckle. "That the technical term, Major?"

She managed a wan smile of her own. "Somehow I feel like I've just about run out of technical terms on this trip."

Daniel meanwhile had propped himself up on his elbows and was fiddling with the camcorder, looking through the viewfinder and then putting it away again in disgust. "It's no use," he grumbled. "Without some sense of scale the pictures will be next to meaningless." He looked across once more at the only structure left standing, and his complaints trailed away. "What's the point? No one would believe us anyway."

"They will believe you, Daniel Jackson. But they will not understand."

Daniel turned his head. "No," he agreed. "They won't."

They made camp at the foot of the artificial mountain range. Daniel had wanted to push on, but he didn't fight too hard when Jack immediately vetoed that idea. Everyone was exhausted. Climbing down had been a sonuvabitch because not even Teal'c could walk easily with that structure filling their field of vision. It was more than just the size of the thing, Jack was convinced. The major architectural details were plain, stone piled atop stone, but something seemed wrong about the angles, and when Jack turned his head carelessly and glimpsed it from the corner of his eye, the entire front facade seemed to undulate.

The worst was the black void beneath a pediment hundreds of meters tall. The height of the opening itself defied calculation, and Jack didn't enjoy thinking about what could possibly have needed a front door that size. If it had been the same creatures whose images were engraved on the stone, then Jack was pretty sure he didn't want to know.

Scratch that, he was damned certain he was better off not knowing, even if they had been gone these past two million years.

Carter finally asked the obvious question. A sickly sunset shimmered in the west over the broken horizon, but rather than watching it, far less the structure ahead of them, they were all focusing too much attention on a pot of water which was not yet boiling over the sterno burner. Teal'c had wanted hot chocolate.

"Why do you think it's the only place still standing?"

Even Daniel was focused on the not-boiling water in the stainless steel pan. He didn't glance over his shoulder at the building itself. "Obvious answer, I guess, is that it was the most important. Hence it was built with the deepest foundations, the sturdiest walls."

"Government building?" Carter hazarded. "No, a temple."

"Sports stadium," Jack suggested. "Kiwanis Club."

"Dormitory," Daniel said.

Feeble, but Jack was glad to hear him try. "So that's why they made the front door so big. So's they could get the keggers down to their room."

The dream was waiting for Jack that night. He was still halfway aware of the sleeping bag snugged around his shoulders and Daniel's light snores when he heard Charlie calling.

Just a dream, Jack thought, but he got up from his living room sofa and told Daniel he'd be right back, that he had to see what Charlie was doing first. His voice was coming from the garage, but when Jack got there, Charlie was nowhere to be seen.

"Charlie? Where are you?"

He heard his son's voice again. At first Jack thought he must be outside, but then he realized the voice was coming from under his feet. Charlie was in the cellar, of course, and in Jack's dream it didn't seem strange at all that his house now had a cellar, far less one that was reached by way of a hidden door behind Jack's workbench. Jack touched the secret panel, and an entire section of the back garage wall swung open to reveal a cobwebbed staircase. Pretty cool, actually. How had he forgotten about this?

"Hey, Daniel!" he yelled. "You ought to come see this." He started down the winding staircase without waiting for Daniel's answer. "Charlie! You down there?"

This time Charlie didn't answer, but Jack could hear small footsteps skittering away. A game of hide and seek. "Careful on the steps," Jack called down to him. Poor Sara _so_ wouldn't approve of this. That was probably the real reason Jack never used these stairs.

Further and further down Jack followed the sound of Charlie's footsteps. The stone walls dripped with moisture and glowed with a dim yellow phosphorescence that grew brighter as the stone gave way to packed earth. The stairs became rough and uneven, and eventually Jack found himself in a steeply-descending tunnel chiseled through solid rock. He was so far underground that he began to sweat in the heat, and he'd almost forgotten he was following Charlie at all when the tunnel took an abrupt turn, and Jack felt a breeze on his face. The air was cool, but he caught the faintest whiff of something fetid.

The tunnel ended at a cliff overlooking an underground chamber so vast the far walls were lost in the distance. Everything was lit with the same pallid light, and the waters of a black lake lapped at a rocky shoreline. Jack thought he saw a moored boat, but before he could be sure, he finally spotted Charlie at a distance below him. "Hey!" Jack called, waving his arm and trying to figure out how to climb down to him. "Up here!"

Charlie was crouched on his elbows and knees. He paid no attention to Jack. His hands were busy at something Jack couldn't see, and he ducked his head once, and then twice. When he finally raised his head, something thin and glistening was stretched taut between his mouth and the thing he held squirming against the ground.

"Jack," Daniel said from behind him. "What is it?"

Jack whirled around, trying to shield him, but Daniel had already seen, and unlike Jack, he wasn't crippled by silence. He began to scream, and he was still screaming when Jack woke up.

_Christ._

Jack was shaking and covered in a cold sweat, but he found his flashlight immediately. Daniel was wrapped in his sleeping bag, his fingers clenched white around the edge under his chin. His eyes were wide open but blind, and he was yelling himself hoarse.

"Colonel O'Neill!"

"_Colonel!_"

The tent flap was unzipped and the nylon walls flapped like sails in the reassuringly artificial white light of Carter's and Teal'c's flashlights.

"It's all right," Jack said, meaning only, "nobody's _dead_," because clearly nothing was all right. He put his hand on Daniel's face and said, "Wake up, c'mon Danny, wake up," and then hauled Daniel bodily up in his arms, but that only made things worse. Daniel continued to yell, every shriek like a physical blow, and now he was fighting against the restraints of the sleeping bag and Jack's arms as well. "Aw, c'mon," Jack groaned, "wake the hell up already."

"Must be night terrors," Carter said. "Cassandra used to get them. It was impossible to wake her up."

Thanks, Major. That's very helpful, Jack didn't say out loud, his arms full of fighting archeologist. Daniel was wailing and wrenching his body so violently Jack didn't know how much longer he'd be able to hold him.

Then Daniel's head suddenly snapped around and caught Jack square on the nose.

"Son of a _bitch_!" Jack squawked at the red explosion of pain, and then Teal'c was there, just a couple of second too late. He dragged Daniel away, still kicking and screaming, while Jack clamped a hand over his face and felt the gush of blood against his palm.

He lurched his way out of the tent and allowed Carter to help him up. Teal'c was holding Daniel immobile in a bear hug, obviously trying to avoid getting a bloody nose himself, and Daniel's yells had turned into sobs. His sleeping bag trailed along the ground, still tethered around his ankles.

Carter pushed a wad of gauze into Jack's hand. "Sit down, sir," she ordered him kindly. "Tilt your head back."

Numbly, Jack did as he was told. Daniel didn't seem to be fighting quite so hard anymore, and when he was hanging almost limp in Teal'c's arms, Carter pulled the sleeping bag off his feet and shook it out. Daniel had finally stopped screaming, but he wept as Teal'c eased him down and settled him on top of the sleeping bag. Carter knelt on the ground beside him, holding his hand and petting his head, muttering soft nonsense to him. Daniel's face was turned away so Jack couldn't see whether his eyes were open or closed, but he was certain Daniel was still asleep.

Charlie never used to wake up after a bout of night terrors, either.

God, Jack hated this planet.

"How severe are your injuries, O'Neill?"

"Don't think he broke my nose. Hope not, anyway." He cautiously lifted away the gauze, and a fresh gush of blood spilled over his lips and chin. He immediately put the gauze back. The taste of blood in his mouth and the thick feel of it running down his throat reminded him of his dream.

He really, really hated this planet.

"There's a chemical cold pack in the medical kit," Carter said, not budging from Daniel's side. "Teal'c, could you get the thermal blanket out, too? I think it'd be best not to move him again, now that he's finally settling down."

Teal'c brought the cold pack and fresh gauze to Jack and spread the blanket over Daniel.

"You think this could be a symptom of hypoxia, sir?" Carter asked eventually.

"That's what I'm thinking." Really, it might be. "We'll make sure he spends some quality time with an oxygen tank before we start back in the morning, sinuses or no sinuses."

"We're not going on to the temple?"

"If Daniel's getting sick we can't risk it."

When his nose finally stopped bleeding, he sent Carter back to bed and took her place at Daniel's side. She protested that she didn't mind sitting up so Jack could rest, but she was nodding with exhaustion even as she said it.

"Get some sleep, Sam," Jack said, not making it an order. "One of us needs to have a clear head in the morning."

"All right." Her voice was soft as she eased her hand free of Daniel's grasp and crawled into her tent.

"I am not certain any of us are capable of a 'clear head' in this place, Colonel O'Neill." Teal'c moved into the ring of lamplight.

"Do you know something about this planet?"

"I do not. If Apophis had any knowledge of this place, he never shared it with his first prime, and I know of no Jaffa legends which speak of it."

"OK, then what's up?" Not that Jack doubted him.

"I have not been able to achieve kel-no-reem since our arrival."

"Junior acting restless?"

Teal'c bowed his head. "To the contrary. My symbiote has been extremely quiescent."

"Then what's up?"

"I believe Daniel Jackson is not the only one experiencing sleep disturbances."

Well, he had that right. Jack looked down at Daniel, breathing open-mouthed, one hand protruding from under the thermal blanket and splayed upon the ground. "We're leaving in the morning, Teal'c. I've had about enough of this place, too."

* * *

Daniel's sleep was restless. Jack found himself selfishly hoping he would wake up so they could talk, but if Daniel really were suffering from hypoxia, he needed his sleep. He grumbled and kicked, flinching and shivering as the long night wore slowly away. Once or twice he shouted out loud, but he calmed down when Jack took one of his flailing hands in both of his own. "Easy does it. Everything's under control here."

"'s'only sleeping," Daniel mumbled, the first words Jack had been able to understand in hours.

At first Jack thought he was finally awake. "Hey, I'll live. I know you didn't mean to. You were sound asleep."

"Still here," Daniel slurred and then one more syllable that could have been Jack's name, or something else altogether. Jack bent cautiously closer, feeling an immediate pain from his swollen nose, and tried to see Daniel's face by lamplight.

"What's still here?"

A sliver of white showed under Daniel's eyelids. He was still asleep after all. Dreaming, probably. Jack adjusted the blanket over Daniel's shoulders and wished for dawn.

The yellow crescent moon had set, and the east was glowing a dark, bloody red when Daniel finally awoke. "God," he moaned, rolling onto his back. "What the hell happened?"

The weight of relief made Jack's shoulders sag. In some dark, illogical part of his brain he'd been halfway afraid that Daniel was never going to wake up again. "Welcome back, Sluggo," he whispered happily. "How you feeling?"

Daniel squeezed his eyes shut. "Honestly? Like you guys have been using me for zat gun practice. Uh, Sluggo?"

"Now there's an idea. Lot of sore muscles?"

"Ohhh, yeah." Daniel tried to stretch his arms over his head, winced in pain and let them fall back to his sides. "What happened?"

"You had a mother of a nightmare last night. We couldn't wake you up."

"So you thought you'd knock me around a little instead?"

"It was more the other way around."

Daniel's eyes flew open, and he truly focused on Jack for the first time. "Oh, God. Are you all right?"

"Just have to be careful when I blow my nose. I'm fine."

"I'm sorry. I didn't -- Sam? Teal'c?"

"They both had the good sense to stay out of range."

"Aw geez. Jack, I'm sorry."

"Yeah, I figure you can share a tent with Teal'c from now on."

Daniel still looked miserable, but then he raised his eyebrows. "This mean we're finally even?"

Jack shook his head and smiled down at him. "You've been holding a grudge all this time? Guess I'm lucky you didn't clobber me in your sleep years ago."

Daniel just blinked at him.

"Anyway, Carter thinks hypoxia could have contributed to your, uh, bad night. I want you on oxygen this morning."

"But I hate --" Daniel raised his eyes to Jack's face. "OK. Oxygen."

"You know, Charlie had night terrors a time or two when he was real young. The next morning he told me he thought he'd been stuck on a railroad track with a train bearing down on him." Jack made a whooshing gesture with one hand. "Poor kid. I'm sure it was from the time Sara and I took him on the old Silverton-Durango steam engine."

Daniel smiled a little uncertainly.

"Don't suppose you happen to remember what you were dreaming about last night, do you?"

No answer.

"Do you remember anything?"

"No," he whispered, but his eyes began to fill with tears.

"Daniel Jackson," Teal'c hailed as he strode back into camp. "It is good to see you awake. I hope you are well."

Carter stuck her head out of the tent, looking mussed and just a little fragile (though Jack wouldn't have admitted it under pain of death) as she always did first thing in the morning. "Daniel. You're awake."

Daniel didn't acknowledge either of them. A tear spilled from the corner of his eye and ran across his temple. He made a vague gesture of helplessness as a second one fell. "I don't remember last night," he whispered.

Aw, hell, Jack thought. "It's all right," he told Daniel just as helplessly, as Daniel wiped his eyes with the back of his fist and pressed his lips together hard. "I just thought... It's all right. Don't worry about it."

Daniel nodded, tried to say something else and then gave it up when his voice broke. He flung his arm over his eyes and took a few deep breaths before managing to whisper, "But I'm OK."

Jack put his hand on Daniel's shoulder and squeezed hard. "I can see that. Just take it easy. It's been a rough night."

Daniel lowered his arm and fumbled for Jack's hand. His eyes were still red and wet. "I'm all right," Daniel repeated stubbornly, but he held on hard.

* * *

> The rushes grew, the rushes grew,  
> the mourning reeds grew.
> 
> The Lament for Sumer and Urim (2000 BCE)

* * *

"What do you mean we're going back to the gate? Jack, have you lost your mind?"

Jack finished stuffing their tent into the storage bag before turning around. Daniel must be feeling better if he was shouting insults.

Sure enough, the roses were back in Daniel's cheeks with a vengeance. Whether it was the oxygen tank or his morning cup of coffee that had done the trick, Jack was ridiculously happy to see him looking better. "The tiniest modicum of respect for your commanding officer might not be _entirely_ amiss," he said cheerfully.

Daniel stared at him. "What?"

"Get your stuff. We're going home."

"You've got to be kidding me. When we're only a couple of klicks away?"

"Closer to five or six, but who's counting?"

"I don't understand this at all. We spent all afternoon climbing over that pile of rubble just to turn around and go right back? You knew how far it was yesterday."

Jack was vaguely aware of Carter and Teal'c studiously paying attention to packing their gear. "Yesterday you weren't showing signs of oxygen deprivation."

"I'm not showing them today either."

"Sleep disorders are an early symptom of hypoxia." Jack gestured towards his own face. Daniel immediately looked guilty, though, predictably, no less defiant.

"Jack, I'm fine."

"And I look forward to hearing Dr. Fraiser confirm your diagnosis." Jack went back to looping the tent to the bottom of his pack, aware of Daniel's frustrated glower.

"Dammit, do you have any idea how important this could be?"

"Right now, not nearly as important as getting you, Carter and Teal'c to the gate."

"I'm not going back."

_Oh, for --_

Jack took his time getting up to face Daniel. He was standing with his feet planted and his jaw stubbornly jutted, but the way his arms were crossed hard over his body was a dead giveaway.

Teal'c and Carter weren't even pretending to pack anymore.

"And is this supposed to convince me that you're not half-loopy from hypoxia? Announcing that you intend to stay behind on a planet with no food and no water and for that matter, damned little air?"

Daniel was breathing hard with emotion, so frustrated and angry it pained Jack to look at him. But then Daniel's own gaze suddenly dropped, and something like a smile twisted the corner of his mouth. "So," he asked. "Is it working?"

"Not particularly well, no."

"Ah." Daniel nodded to himself. "Maybe I'd do better spending my time writing a new mission proposal. More equipment and personnel. Water and oxygen for an extended stay, that sort of thing. Little less loopy?"

"Little less," Jack said. "I'll let you know."

"OK," Daniel agreed, and then turned on his heel and took off running hell for leather.

Oh, _Christ_.

"Teal'c!" Jack bellowed as he pelted after him. "Head him off! Teal'c!" For an instant Jack was almost close enough to brush the back of Daniel's BDUs, but idiotic sentiment kept him from simply tackling Daniel like he should have done, and in the next instant Daniel was pulling away, long legs stretching and arms pumping. Jeezus, the little sonuvabitch could move when he wanted to.

The low oxygen made Jack feel like he was running through molasses, and the harder he pushed the more sluggish he felt. He could hear Teal'c and Carter shouting, but Jack didn't spare breath for any more words. Obviously Daniel was way past hearing any of them.

The black maw of the temple utterly filled Jack's field of vision, even five kilometers away. He tried not to see it, but it was impossible not to be aware of the nothingness that already seemed to have engulfed Daniel. If it weren't for the pain in his lungs and the jarring impact of his feet hitting the hard-packed earth, Jack would have had trouble believing he was really running at all. The scale of that open door made movement itself seem a delusion. They could run forever and never get any closer.

At least, not until the moment they suddenly found themselves inside.

Jack wasn't going to let that happen. He ran harder, pushing past the hot flare in one knee. When was he going to start trusting his instincts, and to hell with anything Daniel said? He'd hated this planet from the start. Should have ordered them all straight back through the gate the moment it became obvious they couldn't even stand up around here without wanting to puke.

He was on the verge of yelling to Teal'c to use his zat when Carter caught up with Jack and passed him, her smaller stature giving her the advantage in this atmosphere. She pulled almost even with Daniel and sideswiped him like a lioness knocking an antelope off its feet, and they both went down in a sprawl of limbs. Jack almost fell over them.

Teal'c skidded to a stop, dropping to snatch Daniel's hands and yank them over his head while Carter sat on his knees to keep him from kicking. Daniel's face was turned to one side and his eyes were squeezed shut. Though he was panting and red-faced, he didn't look to Jack like he was fighting back.

"Carter," Jack said, when he was able to speak, "We got anything in the med kit that would --" he trailed off and gestured.

"No sir," Her face was schooled into impassivity, dust smeared across one cheek and a bright red spot coming up on the other where Daniel's elbow or chin had connected when they went down. "We don't usually carry thorazine on missions."

"Maybe it's time to start," Jack muttered, not quite under his breath. "Goddammit, Daniel, what the hell do you think you're doing?"

"I do not think he knows himself," Teal'c said.

"Well, _something's_ going on in that addled head." Jack knelt awkwardly. "Daniel." He cautiously laid his palm against the side of Daniel's face. He could feel Daniel's pulse thundering beneath the fragile skin at his temple. "Take it easy. Let's talk about this."

Daniel wouldn't open his eyes. "You sure, Jack?" His ribcage heaved as he fought for air. "Lot easier just to tranquilize me."

"Maybe so," Jack said, his heart breaking. "But you heard Carter. Doc Fraiser won't trust us with the good drugs."

"Too bad," Daniel rasped.

Jack had to look away. The temple filled his entire horizon, the darkness beyond that monstrous open door looking blacker than the depths of space.

And that was wrong, he suddenly realized, and not just in the atavistic, superstitious sense of 'wrong' they'd all been fighting since they tumbled out of the gate onto this world, but physically wrong. The rising sun was behind them. Why was that open door still dark? "Carter," he said, jerking his head in the direction of the temple. "Why the hell can't we see inside?"

She raised both eyebrows at him, not seeming to comprehend the question, then reluctantly turned her head to look. Teal'c did the same. Jack knew the moment she got it, because she flinched as though realization was a charge of static electricity, and that was just wrong, too. Jack should not be the one noticing shit like this _first_. They had to get their asses away from this planet.

"You can get off me now," Daniel said. His face was still turned to the side, but his eyes were open, carefully not focusing on anything.

Jack shook his head at Carter and Teal'c. "Sorry, Danny. Too much trouble runnin' you down the first time."

Daniel closed his eyes again.

Fuck this, Jack thought. His lungs were aching as though he'd never get enough air in them again and he was pretty sure he'd wrenched something in his knee which was going to make climbing back over that mountain-sized rubble heap more fun than a barrel of monkeys, never mind how the hell they were going to get a recalcitrant Daniel over it.

He grabbed Daniel's chin and turned his face. "Look at me," he said. After a long moment, Daniel opened his eyes. Given their current state of affairs, Jack decided this counted as progress. "Did you honestly think that I'd just let you _go_?"

Daniel only blinked at him.

"What's in that temple that's more important than food or water or air? We talking meaning of life stuff, here? Why the hell didn't you tell me?"

Nothing.

Jack allowed himself to look away for a moment -- trying to deal with Daniel in this state was shredding something deep inside him into little, tiny, painful pieces. He caught Teal'c's eye, and behind a stoic facade only marginally more convincing than Carter's, Jack saw his grief for Daniel, compassion for him.

"What's in that temple?"

Daniel stared at him with a face like stone. "Let me go."

"No." Jack remembered something Daniel had mumbled last night. "But it's sleeping, whatever it is. How long, Daniel? Two million years? Longer? It's only sleeping, and it's still here."

Daniel's eyes widened. "How do you know that?" he whispered, his voice so quiet Jack had to bend low in order to hear him.

"You told me. Last night. You were talking in your sleep."

"Oh, God," Daniel moaned. "Oh, my God. Jack." He wrenched his head from side to side, his face contorted into a terrible grimace, sounds that weren't words anymore spilling from behind his clenched teeth.

"Daniel!" Jack caught Daniel's head in both hands to stop him from thrashing. "Daniel, listen to me. There's something here that's been sleeping for a long, long time."

"_Yes._" Spittle flew from his lips.

"What _is_ it?"

"I don't know!" Daniel screamed. A convulsion wracked his pinned body. "But I can feel it. It knows we're here. Oh please, Jack. Please help me."

"Jesus, Danny, I'm trying the best I know how. You gotta give me a little more to work with."

"You must calm yourself, Daniel Jackson." Teal'c covered both of Daniel's wrists with one hand and placed the palm of his other hand on Daniel's forehead. "You are surrounded by friends, and any one of us would gladly give our lives to protect you."

After a long moment, Daniel stopped fighting. Jack glanced up quickly at Teal'c, feeling ever so slightly jealous. Why hadn't he thought of that?"

Daniel made a weak sound that Jack thought was coughing, but after an amazed instant decided was probably a feeble laugh instead. "I don't want anyone to give their lives, really."

"That makes four of us," Jack said. He sat back on his haunches. Teal'c's hand remained on Daniel's forehead, but he kept his other hand on Daniel's wrists, obviously not trusting Daniel's mercurial humors any more than Jack did this morning. Despite the cool air, the sun felt hot on Jack's shoulders, and no light pierced the shadow beyond the open door. He would have liked to ask Daniel more about what he knew -- or thought he knew -- about the temple and its theoretical slumbering inhabitant, but it obviously wasn't a topic Daniel could discuss calmly right now.

Jack was weary to his bones, and it was going to be a long, long walk home.

* * *

> Thy food is the food of ghosts  
> Thy drink is the drink of ghosts
> 
> Quoted in Thompson's _The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia_ (1903)

Teal'c apologized gravely to Daniel before tying his hands with Sam's belt, but Daniel hardly seemed to notice. He allowed himself to be walked back without complaint, and he sat on the ground with his bound hands resting awkwardly in his lap and an oxygen mask strapped over his face while the rest of them finished breaking camp.

"You can let me go now," he said when Jack finally took off the oxygen mask. His voice was flat and he met Jack's eyes with a steady blankness that was so un-Daniel-like Jack fought the temptation to grab his shoulders to see if he could physically shake him into his right mind.

"Sorry," was all Jack said. "Twice burned. But look on the bright side -- at least you don't have to carry your own pack over the hill." They had already redistributed its contents among themselves. Hell, what was another fifteen pounds or so among friends?

Jack's nose started bleeding again on the way up, and it continued intermittently all the way to the summit. His head was aching so badly his vision began to gray out, and finally he had to call for a break so he could crouch miserably against a shattered building stone larger than his house, his head bowed and his hands clasped over the back of his neck. He counted his breaths and tried to think about being somewhere else. Home on a Saturday afternoon millions of light years away from this damned planet. Watching a game or working in the yard, maybe.

Over the past year or two, Daniel had gotten into the habit of stopping by to help on summer afternoons. Yard work was apparently a complete novelty to the man, and he took such a childish delight in the electric weed eater that Jack had started to save trimming around the raised beds for those weekend afternoons when Daniel was around. Throw something on the grill later on; sit and drink a beer or a gin-and-tonic, since Daniel had a taste for sweet, fizzy stuff, watch the sky turn red. Marvel wordlessly at the fact that they were both still alive, that Earth was still free.

"If it stays as warm as it has been this spring I'll probably need to cut the grass next weekend," Jack said. He raised his head carefully and squinted his eyes open. His skull felt too tight for his brains and he imagined he could feel the dull sunlight slipping under his eyelids like stilettos. "Pretty sure I've got some frozen burgers in the fridge if anyone's interested."

"Tell me those aren't the same hamburgers left over from last summer," Sam said in a thin voice. She was white to the lips and her eyes were bloodshot. Fighting the same headache as Jack, he knew, because that little morning jog after Daniel this morning had taken it out of all of them. Human beings weren't built to perform calisthenics in an atmosphere like this.

"Hey, they've been frozen all this time. They're still good."

"Please. Please don't." She actually looked sick enough to puke. "I can't stand thinking about Colonel O'Neill freezer-burn specials right now."

"It is not a savory prospect." Even Teal'c was looking a little strained. Daniel was sitting at Teal'c's feet, his legs drawn up, bound arms stuck straight out and resting on his knees. His head was down so Jack couldn't see his face.

"How you doing there, Daniel?"

"Great," he said, not looking up. "Just great, Jack."

"Head hurting?"

Daniel snorted.

Probably felt ready to explode, Jack thought, given how badly the atmosphere was affecting him already. Keeping Daniel tied up at this point seemed ludicrous, and besides, it was slowing them all down when Jack would have liked nothing better than to be able to make up a little speed. He turned his head to remind himself why they had to do it.

He immediately felt the vertigo in his head and in his gut. The darkness of that vast open door seemed to ripple outwards like a cheesy flashback effect, and Jack whipped his head away so fast he nearly ended up face down on the rocks. He caught himself with a groan, and felt the sickening trickle of blood start again.

"Let's go, kids," he groaned, blotting at his nose with the last of the medical gauze.

He was concerned that Daniel might try to make a break for it at the summit, and it was obvious from Sam and Teal'c's shifting glances they were watching for the same thing. Jack didn't call for a rest when they reached the top, and he didn't look back as they started down the other side. The first dozen paces downward made the dull pain in his knee flair up smartly, just as he'd predicted, but every step further they traveled without Daniel losing it felt like a hell of an accomplishment.

Besides, simply knowing the darkness of that open temple door could no longer watch them felt like fifteen pounds out of his pack again.

"Still with us, Daniel?"

Teal'c was helping him navigate a crevasse, but Daniel looked up when Jack spoke to him. His expression seemed resigned instead of blank, and Jack decided that counted as progress, too.

"I didn't know what to do," Daniel announced quietly. "Stupid. It's not like we even matter." His foot slipped in the next instant, but Teal'c caught his shoulders and steadied him.

"What were you _trying_ to do?" Jack risked asking.

But Daniel was already gone. His eyes were fixed on the ground, and the tight lines around the corners of his mouth and between his eyebrows betrayed nothing except that he had a headache. Jack had already known that.

They made camp at the foot of the mountain even though there were still two hours of sunlight left. They were down to their last oxygen tank, and they were far lower on water than Jack would have liked, but the truth was they were all simply too exhausted to continue. Well, Teal'c could have kept slogging on, but Jack wasn't willing to separate them to send Teal'c on to the gate unless their straits became truly dire. So far this didn't qualify, despite Daniel's terrifying distance from them all.

No one felt much like eating. Daniel simply refused, wordless but immovable, and after Sam had eaten half of a grilled chicken MRE she stumbled away from camp and vomited it up again.

At dusk they tied poor Daniel like a stalking goat on top of his sleeping bag and under a thermal blanket. He acceded to this treatment like he had almost everything else today, not talking, not explaining, and if not actively helping, not really resisting either. Jack took the first watch, spreading his sleeping bag next to Daniel's, and he stayed there even after Teal'c relieved him two and a half hours later. Jack laid his head down and fell instantly asleep and into a vivid dream about throwing a cookout at his place. The weather was gorgeous and everyone seemed to be having a blast, but when Sam said please, _please_ tell me those aren't last year's hamburgers, Jack found he didn't have the nerve to turn around and see what actually was smoldering on his grill

He woke up when Daniel called his name.

"What is it? Daniel, are you all right?"

Teal'c had switched on a flashlight, and Jack could see Daniel was struggling to sit up and not able to manage because of the way he was bound.

"Um, I'm all right. I think. Teal'c, is that you?"

"It is I. Are you in distress?"

"No. I don't think so. No." Daniel stopped trying to get up and flopped back down on his sleeping bag. "I don't. Um." He turned his head from Jack to Teal'c and then back again. "I'm wondering, ah. Why are my hands tied to a tent stake?"

* * *

Angel smelled blood rich as butter just before hearing the police sirens, and although he was already very late and the police were close he checked it out anyway, pulling into an alley two blocks down and traveling the rest of the way on foot.

He followed the dense, luscious scent to a prefab warehouse on a street of one-family bungalows behind chain-link fences, apartment buildings on stakes above their garages, a taqueria, a gas station, a combination Chinese restaurant/donut shop and a dollar store sharing the four corners of the nearest intersection. A garage door in back of the warehouse was partially rolled up, a lone yellow light attracting moths above it.

Angel ducked under the door and found himself in a hot, open space where sewing machines on flimsy tables stood in ranks and women's blouses in the colors Cordelia was emphatically not wearing this season were folded and stacked in boxes. The smell of fabric sizing was bitter but the blood was sweet, and there was so much of it Angel swayed on his feet, half-drunk on the smell.

Most of the women were very young, but one of the older ones knew him for what he was and clutched reflexively at the crucifix around her neck. She didn't cry out, though, and didn't make any move to stop him.

Something much worse than the death his kind could bring had already happened here.

He circled the source of the blood while the women wept and held each other and ignored him. There were wasteful spatters on the floor, on the tables and soaked into bolts of fabric. It was on the hands and clothing of the women, and at the bewildered center of the horror, it darkened their faces and colored their mouths as well.

A cardboard box lined with cotton batting and the same fabric as the blouses had been a basinet, and a bottle of formula mixed a little too thin was still sitting on one of the tables next to a sewing machine.

Angel recognized the mother right away. Not because she had more blood on her face than the others -- she didn't, or at least, not _much_ more -- but because while the others wailed and cried out, she sat motionless and silent on a folding stool, and she rolled eyes darker and more hopeless than the ends of burnt-out matches up to him when he asked her in Spanish that would always have a continental accent, no matter how long he lived in California, "What happened to your baby?"


	3. Chapter 3

> "If it is anything real, I say, it is prevailing, little by little, and drawing me more interiorly into hell. Optic nerves, he talked of. Ah! well -- there are other nerves of communication. May God Almighty help me!"
> 
> J.S. Le Fanu "Green Tea" (1869)

Blair thought he had probably been awake for half an hour or more, long enough for the sharp, white sliver of the moon that had first awakened him to slide across the glass of the skylight. Jim was curled up behind him so closely Blair could feel his breaths warm against his shoulder blade. His arm was draped over Blair's waist, his open hand lying gently at the base of Blair's throat, and Blair felt loved and safe and guilty, because he was pretty sure he'd fallen asleep on Jim this evening.

He remembered dinner. Beef stew with good spring vegetables. Most of a loaf of sourdough, washed down with a plain red table wine that had been its own kind of perfection. He remembered putting away the leftover stew and drying the dinner dishes after Jim washed them. He remembered plugging in his laptop and catching up on email while Jim read a book, and he could remember having some vague thoughts for next week's lesson plan and thinking he really ought to type them up while they were fresh in his mind but it was just too much trouble to form words into sentences, and about that time Jim had come up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder and asked him very quietly, his voice a warm whisper in his ear, if he'd like to go to bed now. Long day and all that.

Yeah, it had been a long day. The six A.M. trip to the grocery store, excellent as it was in theory, had some unexpected glitches in practice. He remembered stumbling up to bed with Jim right behind him, clothes hitting the floor and mumbled promises to pick them up in the morning. Jim chuckling, "Liar," at him and gathering Blair's hair up in one hand so he could kiss the nape of his neck.

And that was about it. There were memories of other nights, slipping between cool sheets with Jim, who whispered to him and laughed with him and touched him over and over again until when Blair finally fell asleep his entire body felt over-sensitized as a sentinel's, the sheets rough against his flesh, the pillow unyielding under his head. The only thing that felt right was Jim, and Blair would wrap himself around him blindly, selfishly as he fell precipitously into sleep, and he would have worried a little about that afterwards, those times when he was awake and alone, except that Jim wrapped him in his arms with such sweet, eager warmth he figured it must be all right with Jim, too.

But _last_ night, man, nada. Apparently Blair had fallen asleep as soon as he tumbled into bed. Poor Jim.

Then Jim's hand moved at Blair's throat, and Blair slid carefully out from under his arm and rolled over. "Hey," he whispered, touching Jim's cheek with the back of his fingers. "I was trying not to wake you up."

"I know," Jim answered drowsily.

"Oh. Sorry."

"It's OK," Jim said. He captured Blair's hand in his own and touched his lips to the pads of his fingers. "Think I was having bad dreams anyway."

"Aw, geez, I hate that. Anything you want to talk about?"

"No," Jim said predictably, but he put his arm around Blair's shoulder and tugged a little, and Blair obligingly tucked himself in closer, laying his head on Jim's chest as Jim rolled onto his back. He manfully resisted the urge to ask if everything was OK, and lay listening to Jim's heartbeat while Jim decided if he was in the mood to talk about what was bothering him or not.

He was stroking the back of Blair's head and running his fingers through his hair, and the gentle repetition was on the verge of putting Blair back to sleep, when Jim finally asked, "How do you handle it? Most of the time I try to just accept it without _thinking_ about it too much, but in the middle of the night ..."

Even though it was ridiculous, Blair first thought Jim was talking about the two of them. He lay very still and wondered if Jim could tell how his heartbeat had suddenly sped up in misery.

"Doesn't it seem like wishful thinking to believe it's the _rest_ of the world that's crazy? Doesn't it make more sense if it's just me?"

"Maybe," Blair answered carefully, still not entirely sure what was going on. Jim's chest was warm under his jaw. "Except it's not just you. We're in this together, remember? No matter what."

"I know." Jim's hand stopped stroking, tangling briefly in Blair's hair. "That's why I'm asking you. Everything that happened over Christmas. Does it -- do you think about it when you're at school? When you're at the station? Does it change the way you think about, you know, ordinary stuff?"

Blair worked his hands under Jim's back. "I know it happened," he said. "If I had any doubts, the number of hours we had to spend debriefing with Major Whosits from the Pentagon would convince me that we're not the ones who're crazy. But for the rest of it -- I don't know. Maybe I'm not totally sure what you're asking, but the world's a crazy place and Naomi always said that every answer you find just opens up a hundred new questions, so --"

"So you're handling it."

"I guess. Jim, man, you brought me back from the _dead_. Anything else that happens to me the rest of my life, I figure I can deal."

Jim's chest contracted sharply as though he were laughing, but Blair didn't think that was it. Both his arms went around Blair's shoulders and he hugged him hard. "Christ," he muttered softly.

Blair hugged him back, and eventually Jim said, "There was something at the crime scene today."

"The crime scene. The Kurdish family, you mean. Where that mentally ill woman hurt her children."

"She was trying to devour them," Jim said in his cop voice. "When her husband found her she was gnawing at the throat of her youngest like a dog worrying a bone."

"Oh, God." Blair said faintly. He hadn't seen the police report.

"There was a smell in the house. I should have recognized it right away but I was distracted, or maybe I just didn't want to know. The place stank of blood and cooking spices. I recognized sumac, and toasted sesame seeds and --" Jim swallowed hard. Blair could feel his chest moving. "But there was something else, too. Dead and flat. I don't know how to describe it. Like the way lead smells in freezing cold weather, but more dense than that. Emptier."

Jim had described a scent like that before. "Jim--" he began.

"It was the smell of that place Jackson took me when he got us away from the NID."

"Aw, man --" Blair began, but Jim kept talking as though he wouldn't be able to say it if he let himself stop now.

"Behind the scent of blood and spices and olive oil, I swear to you that woman's house smelled like the end of the universe."

* * *

Insomnia had never really been a problem, so Cordelia had never realized before just how clearly you could hear each bus downshifting as it approached the Melrose-San Vicente intersection.

The police sirens screaming down Santa Monica Boulevard, the car alarms going off outside bars, the constant roar of traffic like waves breaking upon the shore, that was just ambient noise, to the point where she wasn't even sure she'd be able to sleep without it.

Those busses were about to drive her insane, though. She was lying wide awake, staring through a part in the curtains upwards at the orange night sky, listening to bus after bus arrive at the station behind the Design Center. None of them ever seemed to make the light. She listened to the changing whine of the engines as they slowed, the laborious groan as they began to accelerate again, and wondered if she were losing her mind.

You know, it hadn't been _that_ long since she'd been in a live production. True, there was no money in it, or hardly any -- but there was always the chance of being seen, and that more than made up for the long hours and guild minimum pay.

But _this_ damned play was on the verge of making her rethink her strategy when it came to low budget shows. It had taken her forever to learn her lines, which were clunky and a mouthful, sure, but simply shouldn't have been as difficult to memorize as these had proven to be. And now that she had them down, she couldn't get them out of her head.

_The king has opened his tattered mantle._ It played through her mind like a stupid top forties single.

The light on Melrose must have just changed, because she could hear a bus engine beginning to labor its way up the hill.

_The king has opened his tattered mantle. There's naught but Christ --_

According to the director this was the supreme moment of terror, the climax of the entire drama. Cordelia was just going to have to take his word for that, because frankly, as far as she could tell, none of it made any damn sense. It was "artistic." Avant garde, or had been at the turn of the century when it had been written. Which was fine; it was all fine. Critics liked to turn out for the artsy stuff, and that's how you got noticed and talked about.

_The king has opened his tattered mantle. There's naught but Christ to cry to now."_

She rolled over on her stomach. If she couldn't get any sleep, the only thing anyone was going to be talking about were the bags under her eyes.

_The king has opened. The king has opened._

The lines were marching through her mind like toy soldiers on parade. She flopped onto her back again in disgust. Through the part in the curtains she could see a sliver of the moon, and on impulse she blurted out, "For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabelle Lee."

The sound of her own voice in the darkness of bedroom startled her, but it seemed to work. The stupid lines from that stupid play stopped dragging their corpse-like weight through her consciousness, and as soon as she closed her eyes, she drifted peacefully off to sleep.

* * *

> In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.
> 
> Isaiah 6:1-4

Teal'c stood in the doorway of Daniel Jackson's office and watched him work. His head was bowed deeply over a book and one foot was restlessly tapping the floor. Occasionally he turned away to make notations in an open notebook or to type a few keystrokes on the computer, but in the time Teal'c had been there, he had not once raised his head enough to note his presence. The only time he'd looked up at all was to glance with quick nervousness towards the far corner of the room.

When Daniel finally did notice him, he started in annoyance. "Teal'c," he muttered. "I didn't know you were -- have you been there long?"

"I have."

"Oh." Daniel looked back down at his book and then back up at him. "Have you seen Jack around? He's supposed to be looking into travel arrangements for us." Daniel scowled. "Apparently everyone's still a little nervous about that crazy Dr. Jackson, and Jack won't let me go to L.A. by myself."

Teal'c came into the office and looked at the computer screen. Frozen on the monitor was the last image the UAV had transmitted from P3X-636 before it had disappeared into the open maw of the temple, and they had lost telemetry for good.

Utter blackness, relieved only by the flickering date stamp in the bottom right and left hand corners of the screen.

"What do you hope to learn by examining footage of nothing at all?"

"It's not nothing," Daniel said a little sharply. He shook his head and made a vague gesture with one hand that Teal'c assumed was meant to indicate apology. "I wasn't looking at this specifically. Just letting the tape run. I was actually looking at the glyphs and pictures on the temple walls. Some of them remind me of the symbols for the archangels as they appear in the _Liber Ivonis_, but really, with a translation this modern the text is too corrupt for me to be sure of anything."

Teal'c indicated the book lying open on Daniel's desk. The writing was Latin, but Teal'c could only make out isolated words. "This is one of the books that has caused Dr. Mackenzie and Dr. Fraiser to raise questions about your fitness for duty."

Daniel's lips thinned into a tight line. "Yes, it is. Jack told me they're afraid of it."

"I believe Colonel O'Neill is correct in that assessment."

"Great. Just great. Would someone tell me how the hell I'm supposed to do my job when the tools I need make people question my sanity?"

"Apophis and many of the other system lords faced a similar problem."

Daniel's eyebrows went up. "Um, how so, exactly?"

"Apophis greatly feared the spread of education among the Jaffa; yet maintaining an orderly society clearly dictated the need for literacy, at least among certain classes."

"Right, I can see that. How do you make sure the trains run on time if none of the engineers can read a clock?"

"You are speaking metaphorically."

"Uh, yeah." Daniel's squinted up at him. "What does any of this have to do with me?"

"In the theology of Apophis worship, as well as that of many other of the goa'uld, we are taught that every Jaffa has a personal -- " Teal'c had to consider. "Familiar, perhaps, although demon might be a more appropriate translation, mystically bound to his soul."

"Demon. Am'mit?"

Teal'c nodded. "During my apprenticeship, the temple priests taught me that each Jaffa's am'mit usually remains unaware of the soul to which it is tethered. However, excessive reading and writing, particularly the study or transcription of Jaffa history or culture, would awaken the am'mit. Once aware of the soul with whom it shared its existence, the am'mit torments the Jaffa day and night, allowing him neither rest nor peace nor tranquility until he falls into a corrupt madness."

Teal'c realized his fists were clenching as he talked about the old legend, and he forced himself to relax. "One so tormented will be found wanting when judged in the Hall of Maat, his soul forfeit to the Devourer. It was an effective dissuasion against reading and writing anything not directly related to the service of Apophis."

"How very Swedenborian of Apophis," Daniel said. "Though if I remember my metaphysics, Swedenborg thought that every human soul had three demons connected to it. This is fascinating, Teal'c. How come you've never mentioned it before?"

"It is one thing to renounce one's god. It is apparently another entirely to renounce superstitions learnt in one's childhood."

"Yes." Daniel agreed. "I suppose it is."

"Does Dr. Mackenzie believe that your current studies will awaken your own am'mit?"

That surprised a snort of laughter from Daniel, but then he smiled unhappily and said, "That's probably not a bad way of describing it. What does the am'mit do, anyway? Once it's awake and wants to start in with the torment."

Teal'c turned his head toward the empty corner of Daniel's office before answering. "The am'mit manifests as a creature that only the afflicted Jaffa can see. Sometimes appearing as a Jaffa itself, though with subtle and terrible deformations, and sometimes as an animal."

Daniel's head dropped. "That's it? Just an invisible friend?"

"Eventually, the am'mit begins to talk. From that point, the descent into madness is swift and irreversible."

"That's -- that's very interesting," Daniel said, still not looking at Teal'c. "If you'll excuse me, though, I need to try to get some more work done this morning before..." He reached for a pencil, fumbled and dropped it. Reaching for it, he knocked over an almost-full cup of coffee with his elbow. With a yelp of alarm he snatched the book out of the way of the spreading pool of coffee, but his notes were rapidly soaked. Clutching the book to his chest he sputtered, "Godammit! Teal'c, would you please grab some paper towels from the men's room for me?" His voice wavered, and Teal'c suspected he held the book so tightly not only because of its narrow rescue, but to hide the fact that his hands were shaking.

* * *

"So Daniel," Jack said, taking the uncomfortable chair next to him, carefully setting his coke on the floor and the greasy cardboard box containing a pepperoni pizza from the concourse's Pizza Hut on his lap, "Teal'c tells me you two had a nice talk about demons."

Daniel looked up from his book, annoyed. "What? No we didn't. And besides, Teal'c started it."

"Way to convince Mackenzie you're not going nuts."

"Teal'c was talking about --" he broke off and waited for the overly-loud warnings about leaving one's baggage unattended to end. "He was telling me about superstitions Apophis promulgated in order to control the spread of literacy among the Jaffa."

Jack shrugged. "I'm just saying." He flipped open his pizza box. Pepperoni swam in red grease. "Want some?"

"No, uh, thank you."

"Actually, Teal'c was worrying that you were a little freaky about it."

"I'm sure Teal'c didn't say I was 'a little freaky.'"

"Maybe not in so many words," Jack conceded.

"If anything, he's the one who's not over the whole am'mit legend yet." Guilt forced Daniel to add, "But he's right, I was little surprised to hear that the idea of a persecutory being has apparently survived in the religions beliefs system lords impose on their followers."

"Survived from what?" Jack asked, paying rather closer attention than Daniel had expected. He stuffed a good two-thirds of a pizza slice into his mouth, but kept an eyebrow cocked in Daniel's direction as he chewed.

"This is all just theory," Daniel said at last. "And it's probably not susceptible to proof, at least not with our current understanding of goa'uld prehistory. Are you sure it's safe to be discussing this here?"

Jack looked around the concourse. A flight from Vegas was just deplaning, and the swelter of voices and footsteps and luggage carts and baby strollers bounced off poured concrete walls and vast expanses of plate glass and once again off the linoleum-tiled floors, becoming an exhausting, indistinguishable buzz of white noise. He raised an eyebrow at Daniel again.

"Ah. Probably safer here than in your living room."

"Yep. So tell me your theory. 'Not susceptible to proof?' I know this one. That means Carter would turn her nose up at it."

"And I couldn't really blame her, but the more I look, the more pieces fall into place. I'm right about this, Jack. I'm sure I am."

"You do have an annoying tendency to do that," Jack said.

"Do what?"

"Be right. So this wild and crazy theory."

"All right. Keep in mind the dates are still a little sketchy, but sometime between one and a half and two million years ago, I believe the goa'uld began taking hosts from a species who were more powerful than themselves. Ultimately these hosts turned on the goa'uld and almost succeeded in destroying them."

"Hey, this is what you were talking about the other day," Jack said.

Daniel nodded. "At least one breeding queen must have escaped, though, and her spawn would have retained the memory of the goa'uld's greatest defeat. That means the Tok'ra must know about this, incidentally, but I'd like to have a little more information before we tip our hand and let them know that we know about their near-annihilation around the time of earth's second ice age."

"Probably a touchy subject, goa'uld or Tok'ra," Jack agreed. "And it's not like they're so keen on sharing information under the best of circumstances. So where are you getting all this?"

"I believe members of the host species were present on earth in varying numbers well into mankind's prehistory and perhaps even beyond, probably leaving for good about the time city states began to appear in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley."

"Didn't stick around to kick some goa'uld butt again? We could have used their help about that time."

"I'm not sure why they left. I think in the final analysis they didn't really care very much about mankind or the goa'uld one way or another, especially once the goa'uld were using human hosts. The records seem to indicate an utter lack of anything recognizable as human emotions. Nothing like compassion, and nothing like hatred or the desire for revenge either."

"Okay, wait. See, this is what I'm not getting. What kind of records are you talking about? Where's this information coming from?"

"That's the whole point. I think mankind knew about these beings and that we remember them in our history as, um, angels or elves or giants, seraphim and cherubim, devils or demons or djinn, all kinds of supernatural beings. If the goa'uld taught us to fear God, I think these beings taught us there were ways to subvert even the will of the Almighty. We preserved accounts of them in our oldest legends, and once we learned to write, made translations of their own writings. By now there's not much left, of course, but fragments can still be found in ancient works of esoterica and the occult."

Jack had just been picking up his second slice of pizza, but then he set it down again and wiped the pepperoni grease off his hands with an inadequately small napkin. "So that's why you've been reading those old books that have Mackenzie so freaked out. You're on the trail of a race that once had the damned goa'uld for breakfast."

"Yeah. Something like that." He watched Jack's face for the expected skepticism or outright disbelief, but Jack only frowned a little as he wrestled with the implications of what Daniel was saying.

"Well, that's pretty cool," he pronounced at last. "You think you can figure out how they kicked goa'uld butt?"

Jack believed him. Jack didn't think he was nuts, that he ought to be locked up to keep him from haring off on another wild goose chase. Jack _believed_ him.

"Well, I hope I can figure it out," Daniel told him, feeling suddenly, ridiculously happy, even with the prospect of his own am'mit beginning to talk to him just any day now. "And if the clay tablet in Denver's private collection in L.A. is genuine, it could be a huge step forward. He claims the cuneiform is Archaic Sumerian, which is little hard to believe since there's almost nothing but business and administrative records in that dialect, but if he's right, and it really is a religious text from 3200 BCE, it would be the earliest, most authentic account yet of the goa'uld's old hosts. Can I have some pizza after all?"

"Help yourself." Jack held out the box out. The pizza was congealing and would probably give him a hell of a stomach ache by the time they landed in L.A., but right now Daniel didn't give a damn. In his current mood it tasted fantastic.

"So these creatures have a name? Something catchier than 'those badasses who nearly wiped out the goa'uld'? Not that that doesn't have a certain ring to it."

"I don't know what they call themselves," Daniel mumbled around a mouthful of chewy, cold pepperoni. "I've been thinking of them as the Seraphim, but you and Blair Sandburg called them Revenuers."

* * *

> But, according to their fiery nature, it is very difficult for them to appear in this outward world, because there is a whole principle or gulph betwixt them, namely, they are shut up in another quality or existence, so that they can with greater difficulty find out the being of this world, or come with full presence into it, than we can remove into the kingdom of heaven or hell with our intellectual man. For, if it were otherwise, and the devils had power to appear unto mortals as they lift, how many towns, cities, &amp;c. would be destroyed, and burnt to the ground! how many infants would be pluckt away in their innocence, and unoffending creatures be destroyed by their malicious power?
> 
> Ebenezer Sibly (1751-1800), A New and Complete Illustration of the Occult Sciences, Book 4.

They went back to the house in Tacoma Heights the next afternoon. Blair had been worrying about possible turf issues, but the lead detective from the 8th Precinct seemed perfectly happy to accompany Jim and Blair, and was even able to give them a walk through the house. None of the family had yet returned.

"Yesterday I would have said for certain the D.A. wouldn't press charges." Detective Michaelson was a stocky woman with a bulldog jaw and startlingly beautiful green eyes. "But after the L.A. attack, I hear the commissioner is pressuring the district attorney to come down hard on her. Fucking ridiculous. Anyone can see the poor mother is nutty as a fruitcake."

"The L.A. attack?" Blair asked, keeping one eye on Jim. They had already been through the house and now they were picking their way across the tiny back yard. A sleek, self-satisfied calico cat watched their progress from the alley through a chain link fence, then turned and padded away with a contemptuous flick of her tail.

"Yeah, happened too early this morning to make the papers, I guess," Michaelson said. "Bunch of Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants working in an illegal sweatshop. One of them had her baby with her."

"Oh, God. You're kidding. And she -- it was like here?"

"Even worse." Michaelson seemed to take a grim satisfaction in laying out the details, and Blair felt distinctly woozy by the time she finished.

"That's -- oh, God. I don't even know what that is. Some kind of mass hysteria?"

"You're asking the wrong person. All I know is it's going to make things go a lot harder on this poor woman. You got a thing for cats, Ellison?"

Blair turned. Jim was standing against the chain link fence, to all evidence engrossed by the calico cat as she crisscrossed her way from garbage can to garbage can. He didn't answer Michaelson.

"He loves 'em," Blair said. "Got half a dozen at home." He laid his hand on Jim's shoulder, making his touch careful and deliberate. "Jim, man, that cat looks pretty well fed. I bet she already has a good home."

Jim hardly flinched, and when he turned his head to Blair, there was a tight smile on his face. "I think we're finished here. I appreciate your time, Detective."

"Yeah," she said dubiously, looking from Jim to Blair and back again. "Don't suppose there's anything you can give me on this? I hate to see that woman go to jail when she should be in a psych ward."

"Not really my field," Jim said shortly. "Sorry."

Back at the truck Blair asked quietly as Jim opened the door for him, "You OK to drive?"

He looked faintly put out. "I'm fine, Sandburg. Thanks for the concern." Once they were both in the truck he said, "Half a dozen cats at home?"

"I like cats. What, you don't like cats?"

Jim scowled and put the truck in gear.

Blair took a deep breath. "So were you right about what you thought you sensed yesterday? Have those, those _things_, the Revenuers, really come back? You think they could have anything to do with what happened here?"

"All I could smell inside the house was blood and detergent, and I was starting to think I was wrong. Hope I was wrong." Jim's hands tightened around the steering wheel, but then he dropped his right hand onto Blair's knee, and the tension in his shoulders seemed to ease a little. "Then I walked right into a damned pocket of that smell right there by the fence. Nothing about it is natural. It doesn't even disperse like a regular scent would. Clings together like glob of mercury. About that cold and that dense, too."

Blair put his hand over Jim's. "They were here." Blair's voice sounded flat in his own ears.

"I don't know that for sure. Something was, though, and whatever it was left behind a little blobby bit of _nothing_ to go floating off through the neighborhood -- " Jim broke off with a deep breath. "Fuck," he said succinctly.

"Yeah. You gonna call the feds, or you want me to do it?"

"I don't know. Let me talk to Jackson first. Maybe he can do most of the talking to the Pentagon for us."

"Yeah, maybe, but who knows how long it'll take to contact him? Can we really afford to wait that long?" Blair mimed a one-sided phone conversation. "Hello, Air Force? I'd like to talk to a civilian consultant to some super-duper secret project. Yeah, I think it was Stargate, or maybe he's with NORAD, but no one ever confirmed anything for me one way or another except to swear me to secrecy for the rest of my life, so frankly, I've got no idea. But when you track him down, would you have him give me a ring?"

"Or I could just call his cell phone," Jim said.

"You have Daniel's phone number? How do you have his phone number? Last time we saw him he was pretty much completely nonverbal."

"He's called a couple of times."

"He _what_?" Blair turned to stare at Jim. "What the hell does he want? And why didn't you tell me before now?"

Jim almost smiled. "I don't know why I didn't mention it. Couldn't possibly be because I wasn't in the mood to listen to you ranting and raving."

"I'm not ranting and raving."

"You hate the man, Sandburg."

"I do not hate Daniel Jackson. I hate what he does for a living."

"You don't even know what he does for a living."

"He works for the Air Force and he's hiding the truth. That's good enough for me."

"I worked for the Army and I'm still hiding the truth about what I did for them. "

"You know damned well it's not the same thing." Blair took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "And even if it is, as far as I'm concerned he endangered your life -- I know, I know, that's not the way you see it -- but that's the way it looks to me, and OK. Maybe it's sort of hard for me to let go of that. I mean, I could have lost you forever and never even have --"

Dammit. If he kept this up he was going to end up in tears. He broke off and looked fixedly out the side window, but he was holding Jim's hand hard.

"I'm right here, Blair," Jim told him softly. "Not planning on going anywhere."

"I know," Blair said when he could trust his voice again. "So what have you and Dr. Jackson been chatting about?"

"He wants to know what I remember about that place."

"That place? Oh."

"Yeah. Where we were when we weren't on the side of a mountain road in a snow storm with a van full of NID agents, but before we ended up on your bedroom floor. He couldn't remember anything about it himself, once the Revenuers got through with him."

"But there's not that much you could tell him, right? You didn't even open your eyes."

"I couldn't." At the traffic light Jim freed his hand from Blair's grasp and scrubbed it quickly over his face. "At the time Jackson told me that we were looking down on some beautiful city. I knew he was wrong, but I also knew it wasn't worth my life to open my eyes and see for myself."

"Jesus, Jim," Blair whispered.

"I'll call when we get home." Jim said, sounding tired. "I should have known this would never really go away."

* * *

> My body thrives, my heart exults  
> At our walking together;  
> Hearing your voice is pomegranate wine.
> 
> Poem 2, from IIc, The Third Collection, Papyrus Harris 500

Jack was a little tense during the flight to L.A. He didn't relax noticeably while waiting in line for their rental car, and then when Daniel picked up the voicemail message from Jim Ellison on his cell phone, Jack went from tense to stony-faced and positively monosyllabic.

"I'll call Hammond," he said after listening to the message. "You hold our place in line."

"I wonder if we --"

Jack stalked away to find a semi-private place for his call without looking back.

So, OK. Jack was a lot tense. He wasn't the only one. Daniel wrapped his arms around himself and tried not to think too much about the fact that if Detective Ellison was right about what he'd sensed at that crime scene, then as of right now, Daniel was officially out of time.

He watched the harried Avis clerk trace a destination on a freeway map for a father of three ahead of him, the youngest wailing in her mother's arms and the two toddlers squabbling on the floor. Dad looked up from the map to complain in a querulous voice, "I can't believe that's _really_ the most direct route to Anaheim. Do you have someone here who's better at reading a map? I think I need to talk to your supervisor."

On their way to Disneyland, Daniel supposed. Not the sort of family outing of which he had any memory. Watching the fighting kids and cranky parents, it didn't look like he'd missed anything.

He wondered a little insanely if the Revenuers would like Disneyland. It was probably surreal enough to fit their sense of style.

_In exchange for telling us how to destroy the goa'uld -- and incidentally, for NOT wiping out humankind in the process, because I can see where it might be easier from your point of view to just fumigate the entire galaxy -- we promise to share all the secrets of Space Mountain. Is it a deal?_

Maybe he could convince Jack to give it a shot. Hell, Jack O'Neill could probably pull it off.

His smile didn't last long. They were back, and Daniel wasn't ready for them.

He knew more than he had four months ago. He knew, by now, that the goa'uld hadn't merely stolen the Light from the Revenuers, but had once used them as hosts. He had a sketchy timeline for their presence on earth, and had even found the planet of their unspeakable god. The bare memory of P3X-636 still made his flesh crawl. He had dream-like memories of screaming at Jack, crying and cursing him as he was irresistibly drawn to the unnamable who lay sleeping beneath that monstrous temple.

He even remembered, at the final extremity, knowing that Jack would stop him anyway. That Jack would save him, no matter what.

But he had no idea what to do with any of it. Though he understood some of the things the Revenuers had done, he still didn't know who they were, what they wanted, where they came from or how to communicate with them, much less how to ask them for help fighting the goa'uld or even why they were here in the first place.

Actually, he did have a dark suspicion about that one. He thought that it was possible his own use of the Light had drawn them back to a planet they had abandoned five thousand years before.

The crying baby wheezed in another lungful of air and let out a truly earsplitting howl as her mother tried with half-frantic exasperation to shush her. The child's eyes were scrunched up tightly, but she opened them when she ran out of air. Enormous, tear-stained brown eyes peered at Daniel for a moment before she squeezed them shut again, buried her wet face against her mother's neck and continued to wail.

Daniel felt the hairs standing up on the back of his neck, and he forced himself to turn around and look behind him. Nothing. Just an increasingly restless line of tourists and businessmen.

Thank God.

Then something made him look over his shoulder again. The third man back was utterly nondescript, his features hidden by the brim of a battered canvas hat. A dirty trench coat hung on his body like a tent, but it was his hands that drew Daniel's attention. They were as bloated and white as those of a corpse three days drowned.

_You're not real._ Daniel clenched his fists in his pockets and refused to look away. _You're just some kind of psychic boobytrap. You're NOT real, and I'm not afraid of you._

Ironic, that the goa'uld had used their knowledge of the Revenuers' sentry to keep the Jaffa from recording their own history. The am'mit didn't care about Jaffa. Obviously it was here to protect the secrets of Revenuers from prying eyes.

_I'm not your enemy,_ Daniel implored, wondering wildly if persuasion would work where defiance never had. _I just want to save my race from the goa'uld._

A hand fell on Daniel's shoulder. "That's very nice," Jack said, sotto voce. Daniel nearly jumped out of his skin. "But do you really think you should be discussing that here?"

"God, Jack!"

"You all right? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"That's just you, scaring about a decade off my life." The baby had stopped crying, and when Daniel dared to look again, the am'mit was gone. Everyone else in the line was giving Daniel a wide berth, though, and he wondered bleakly how much of his little speech he had said out loud. "Did you talk to Hammond?"

Jack nodded. "Carter and Teal'c are on their way now, and Davis will be meeting them just in case." He spread his hands and shrugged, and Daniel understood. Davis was going in case they needed to mobilize troops against a full scale invasion.

"They don't need us?" His voice was still a little shaky, but he surely had good reason for it to be.

"I told Hammond you thought this ancient tupperware we're going to look at might tell us more about the Revenuers. If that's true, you can do more good down here for now. Am I right about that?"

"Yeah. I hope so."

"OK, then."

"But you could go, Jack. They may need you, especially if things get bad."

"We'll go together when you're finished here."

"I don't need a babysitter."

"Yes, as a matter of fact you do."

"Dammit, Jack --"

"Don't." Jack snarled at him, keeping his voice to a whisper. "Just _don't._ As if things weren't freaky enough, have you forgotten that about three hours ago you sprang the news on me that you've been looking for the Revenuers for months? Now you may not remember what happened the last time they caught up with you, but I can assure you I remember it very clearly." He tapped his temple with two fingers. "You could say it's pretty thoroughly burned into my brain, in fact."

"They didn't hurt me. All they did was erase--"

"Let me refresh your memory. When Ellison found you they had you strung up like a goddammed Christmas tree. They zatted me and Carter, twice. They yanked out Junior. Twice. All in all, they ruined everybody's Christmas, so I'm sorry if it offends you, Daniel, but right now I'm just not in the mood to let you go traipsing off anywhere by yourself."

"Excuse me," said the woman behind the Avis counter said in an exasperated tone of voice. The family going to Disneyland had finally moved on. "May I help you?"

As Jack filled out the paperwork he asked Daniel more calmly, "Do we have time to drop our bags off at the hotel before heading up to Hollywood to see about this guy's etchings?"

Daniel looked at his watch. "It's already six thirty. We'll have to wait until tomorrow."

"You're kidding me. We fly all the way out here to see his precious stuff, and he can't hang around another hour for us? Does he understand the fate of the world could be at stake here?"

"I tried to convince him to wait, but he was pretty adamant about closing time on the phone. He says he won't keep his shop open after dusk, uh, because of the vampires."

Jack turned to stare.

"I'm pretty sure he was kidding," Daniel said.

* * *

The hotel Jack had booked was directly across from Palisades Park. "Why would I stay in some rattrap up in Hollywood?" he growled in response to Daniel's question. "I come to Los Angeles, I want to see the damn ocean. Uncle Sam can afford a couple of decent rooms for the saviors of earth just this once."

Jack wanted to stretch his legs before dinner, so they changed and took a jog through the park as the sun began to set over the ocean, ran across the bridge to the pier and then down the boardwalk almost as far as Venice before turning back. The palm trees were spiky silhouettes against a dark orange sky by the time they returned to the hotel. The concierge scowled at them as they tromped their sweaty selves through the front lobby, but Jack smiled cheerfully back at him and waved.

After showering they walked a few blocks east to an Indian restaurant Daniel remembered from his student days, about a hundred million years ago. It was a relief to find the place still existed and was still filled with British ex-patriots. A rowdy game of darts was going on in the back room, yells and cheers occasionally drowning out the folksinger with the mandolin who gamely continued her set on the front stage all the same. It was all just like Daniel remembered.

He had Nowshera fishcakes and strong, sweet black tea while Jack washed down railway lamb curry with a pint of lager. A warm breeze had blown up by the time they started back, and it smelled of the ocean and of distant shores. Jack seemed content to walk in silence, but the tea had left Daniel feeling wired He wanted to talk about everything, explain everything he was thinking to Jack, but with an effort he confined himself to Denver's cuneiform tablet.

He was trying not to get his hopes up, he told Jack, but what a find it would be if it proved to be authentic, not just in regard to Daniel's immediate research, but for the entire study of Archaic Sumerian. There was so little extant anyway, and what they did have was almost exclusively bookkeeping or school exercises. Imagine what it would mean if it proved to be an extensive religious text after all.

"Yeah," Jack said, but under the streetlight Daniel could see he was smiling. "Just imagine."

By the time they reached the hotel again, Daniel could hardly recognize himself as the humorless, owl-eyed creature who'd been hunched up under Cheyenne Mountain studying occult texts for the last four months. He felt more alive than he'd been -- well, hell, probably since he'd encountered the Light.

"Carter or Davis will call if they need us before morning," Jack said at his room door. "Me, I'm hoping everybody gets a good night's sleep before the shit hits the fan."

"Maybe it won't."

Jack raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Good night, Daniel."

"Good night, Jack."

Daniel let himself into his room and slid the deadbolt home. His room didn't face the ocean, but maybe he'd be able to hear the waves if he opened a window anyway.

More likely, all he'd hear would be the traffic on Wilshire Boulevard. Oh well.

Then he turned around and saw the man in a dirty trench coat slumped in the chair by the corner. His crumpled canvas hat still hid his face, and the soft, plump hands resting palms-up on his knees were fish-belly white in the lamplight.

Without a word, Daniel stepped back out in to the hallway and let the door swing shut behind him. At the click of the automatic latch he began to shake, and he was still trembling when he crossed the hall to Jack's door, and after a long hesitation, quietly knocked once.

The door opened almost immediately. Jack was down to his boxers, one sock, and his unbuttoned shirt. "Daniel?" he asked. "What is it?"

"Jack," he said helplessly.

Jack looked at him. "You've got a hell of a sense of timing, Dr. Jackson," he said at last. Both his voice and his eyes had gone very soft.

"Well, come in, if you want," he continued, when Daniel simply stood there staring at him.

At last he put two fingers under Daniel's chin and eased his mouth closed. "Catching flies, Danny," he whispered. "Come on." He drew Daniel in and shut the door behind them.

Oh, Daniel thought at last, as Jack eased him back against the door, one hand curved at the nape of his neck, his other gently fisted around the collar of his shirt. Jack thinks -- _oh_.

"Thought I was playing it so close to the chest," Jack murmured ruefully. "So much for Special Ops." Then he leaned forward and kissed Daniel's mouth.


	4. Chapter 4

> First, believe that a god is a being in a state of bliss and immortality ...If you accept this, you cannot attribute to the gods anything that is contrary to immortality or that is inconsistent with a state of bliss. Rather, you will expect of them whatever sustains both their state of bliss and their immortality. For truly there are gods, and belief in them is obvious. But they are not such as the crowd think.
> 
> Epicurus (342-270 BCE)

Really, Blair wished that throwing a temper tantrum had been one of his options. He thought kicking and yelling and pounding his fists on the floor to protest the generally fucked up state of the universe would have made him feel better, at least for a minute or two.

It wouldn't have done anything for Jim, though, who was parked in front of the television set pretending to watch sports coverage on the local late night news. The beer in his hand was surely room temperature and flat by now, and even though the sportscaster was recapping tonight's game at length, Blair doubted Jim had any idea who'd won.

He sat down next to him. "Looks like this is going to be Cascade's year after all, huh?"

Jim nodded. "Looks like it."

Blair sighed. "No, it doesn't. The Angels creamed us. Good thing we didn't buy season tickets."

"Ah. Good thing."

"Hey, man." Blair reached for the remote and switched off the television. "You wanna talk about it?"

"Nothing to talk about," Jim said shortly, but he set down his beer and put his arm around Blair's shoulders. Blair leaned against him and patted his knee, and eventually Jim said, "Your Air Force buddies will be here any time now, and then our lives won't be our own again until they decide to leave. I can't see there's anything to gain by talking about it."

Blair didn't bother to point out that they certainly weren't _his_ buddies. "Are you sorry we reported this?"

Jim huffed impatiently. "We didn't have a choice. It's so much bigger than anything. It's like -- I know this sounds stupid, but it's like something just ripped through existence and then tried to sew everything up behind itself, and didn't do a very fucking good job." Jim waved his free hand impatiently. "Aw, never mind. I can't make you understand."

"No, I get it. I get it. It's too big and too freaky to ignore, and we can't possibly handle it on our own."

"Yeah," Jim said. "That's it."

"But see, the thing that makes me nuts is that I don't think the Air Force has any idea what to do about it either. You remember what happened the last time the Revenuers showed. They walked through walls, zapped everyone with their rayguns and then proceeded to do whatever the hell they wanted. You really think anything has changed in the last four months?"

"I don't know. I have to hope so."

"Just not sure I can share your optimism, man."

Jim cocked his head to the side. "I don't blame you. Blair, I'm going to ask you to do something for me here, and you're not going to like it. Hear me out anyway."

Damn. That meant he was really, really going to hate whatever Jim was about to say. Blair tried to control his breathing and not to tense up, but he didn't imagine he fooled Jim for a minute.

"I wouldn't ask if it weren't important," Jim said gently, and Blair nodded a little too fast.

"I know, man, and I'm listening, I am."

"Is Naomi still in Vermont?"

"She'll be at Middlebury through the start of the summer quarter."

"Why don't you go visit her for a few weeks? It's been too long since you two have spent any time together."

"What, _now_?"

"I know the plane ticket will be pretty steep, buying it at the last minute and all. Don't worry about it. I'll be glad to spot you for it."

"You're asking me to _leave_?" Blair pulled away from him, stunned and a little hurt. "How could you think for one minute I could leave you alone with this?"

"Sandburg, you said you'd listen."

"That was before I knew you were going to be talking like some kind of a crazy person. No, Jim. Just, no. End of discussion."

"I know you understand all about, uh, hierarchical command structures from a theoretical point of view, but I've lived in them for most of my adult life, and that means I know what's about to happen here. I know because it's exactly what I would do if I were in Colonel O'Neill's position."

Blair faltered a little. "Where are you going with this?"

"O'Neill's team is going to be trying to defend themselves, this town, hell, maybe the whole planet as far as I can tell. You and me, Blair, we're just pawns. It doesn't matter that O'Neill's people don't mean us any harm. If we can help them gain their objectives, they'll use us just as ruthlessly as I used Incacha's people to defend the Chopec pass."

"Aw, Jim. It's not --"

"If things get bad, I won't be able to protect you. I won't have any authority once this turns into a military operation."

It was too much. Blair put his hands on Jim's shoulders. "Slow down," he demanded. "First of all, if things are going to get as bad as you think, then you _definitely_ need me here with you, and just try to send me away, man, just _try_. But what makes you think this is going to turn into a war zone anyway? They're only sending three people after all."

"Major Davis is the liaison for the Joint Chiefs," Jim said. "So apparently the Pentagon is taking this pretty damned seriously."

"Oh." Blair let his hands fall and sat back on the sofa. "The Joint Chiefs?" He felt dizzy. "Did you know that when he was here before?"

"He was on the phone practically the whole time. I couldn't help but know."

Blair managed a feeble smile. "OK, you win. Now I'm freaking out. You mean to tell me that Naomi Sandburg's blue-eyed boy shared a mushroom and black olive pizza on Christmas day with a man who works for the Joint Chiefs of Staff? I'll never live this down."

"Does that mean you're gonna get on a plane to Vermont after all?" Jim was smiling, but his eyes were sad.

"Not a chance in hell." He smoothed his hand over Jim's forehead and was leaning in to kiss him when Jim pulled him in for a quick hug instead and then stood up.

"They're here," he said.

* * *

Daniel's lips were warm and dry.

Jack's hand lay on his throat so he could feel the ragged flutter of Daniel's pulse against his palm. Keeping his eyes closed he drew back just enough to whisper Daniel's name.

Daniel didn't answer.

Jack nuzzled his prickly cheek, slid his hand forward to cup his jaw, and kissed him again.

Even the dry, cautious touch of lips to lips made Jack dizzy with desire. Drunk on it. Downright stupid in fact, nerve endings sparking like a Van de Graaf generator. Kissing Daniel felt like flying or floating or drowning or dying. He wanted to be rough, to shove Daniel against the door so he could feel all of Daniel's strength pushing back. He wanted to be so achingly tender Daniel would melt against him, exchanging touches gentle enough to last all night. He wanted to tell Daniel everything; he wanted Daniel to already know so that neither of them would have to say a word.

Daniel did know. He was the one who had come to Jack, after all.

He stopped kissing Daniel and whispered, "Thank you," then opened his eyes to take in the sight of him.

Daniel stared back with eyes that were huge with astonishment. Flushed and shaking, breathing in surprised, painful-sounding little gasps, Daniel covered his mouth with his fingers, then touched his lower lip and just kept staring at Jack.

Oh, Jack thought.

You know, this is probably what it would have felt like if they'd been caught in the afterburn of that Saturn V launch. A flash of heat so sudden and extreme the last few electrical impulses in your brain would still be floating around thinking _oh, shit_ a millisecond after you'd already been incinerated.

He tried to say, "I'm sorry," but the sheer magnitude of his mistake strangled the words in his throat. He realized his hands were still on Daniel's face and he pulled them back, turning his palms up in a hopelessly, helplessly inadequate apology.

"No," Daniel muttered. He grabbed at Jack's right hand, snagging two fingers in his fist and holding on too hard for Jack to easily escape. "Jack, I don't --"

"I -- God, Daniel. I know. I --"

"No, you _don't_ know," Daniel insisted. He released Jack's fingers and then dropped his head and started unbuttoning his own shirt. When the third button caught on a thread he yanked at it furiously and swore. He wasn't looking at Jack, and his hands were shaking.

Jack caught Daniel's trembling hands and eased them away. "Careful," he whispered. "You'll tear your shirt."

Daniel gave a nervous stutter of something like laughter. "My shirt." His head finally came up. He hadn't stopped shaking and his eyes were still wide. "My _shirt_?"

His voice was none too steady either.

"It's a nice shirt," Jack said. He wasn't sure of anything anymore, but when he brushed his knuckles across Daniel's cheek, Daniel's eyes closed and he drew a long, shaky breath. "I like you in this shirt."

Eyes still closed, Daniel almost smiled.

"Leave it on for now," Jack whispered. He turned his hand to cradle the side of Daniel's face. "Take it off later if you want."

Daniel turned his head and kissed the palm of Jack's hand and all at once everything made perfect sense again. They looked at each other, and Daniel practically smiled.

Jack opened his arms and tried to grin back, but since he seemed to be on the verge of tears for some damn reason, he wasn't sure how successful a smile it was. Whatever, it worked. Daniel stepped into his arms and laid his head on Jack's shoulder as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world, and when Jack hugged him, Daniel squeezed back hard. "God, Daniel," Jack said softly. Daniel was warm and solid in his arms, but Jack could feel goosebumps rising on his own bare legs. "For a second there --" He slid his arms up Daniel's back and tried to clench his fists in the soft, short hair above the nape of Daniel's neck. Daniel made a quiet sound and lifted his head and this time when they kissed, Daniel opened his mouth and kissed him back hungrily.

It wasn't like Jack's happy dreams. Everything was clumsier; nothing quite fit. They had to figure out how to hold their heads, butting together blindly with their hands in each other's hair, trying to avoid knocking noses or teeth as they kissed. They were all elbows and knees, and when Jack pushed Daniel against the door to support him while he was sucking the warm flesh just over the collar of Daniel's shirt, the doorknob hit the small of Daniel's back hard enough to make him yelp in protest. Daniel tried to walk them towards the bed, probably figuring they were less likely to hurt themselves if they were lying down, and stepped hard on Jack's bare toes.

"I'm sorry," he groaned, laughing and trying to kiss Jack between every word. "I'm sorry. Are you all right?"

Jack just hoped no one had called hotel security on them. He dropped down on the end of the bed holding Daniel's hand, and Daniel sat down beside him and kissed him again. This time he got the angle right on the first try. Jack worked on the third button on the Daniel's shirt one-handed as they kissed, but finally he yanked too hard and just broke the thread anyway.

The first time he laid his hand on Daniel's bare chest, Daniel broke their kiss with a gasp.

* * *

> No door can shut them out, No bolt can turn them back. Through the door, like a snake, they glide, Through the hinge, like the wind, they storm.
> 
> The Seven Evil Spirits, R.C. Thompson, translator, The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia (1903) (from the sixteenth tablet of the "Evil Demon Series")

* * *

They looked so different out of uniform. Well, Major Davis was still _in_ uniform, so no change there, but Blair might have passed Teal'c and Major Carter on the street without a second glance, both of them in leather jackets and blue jeans, T-shirts and boots. Teal'c covered his facial tattoo with a Jags cap, and Major Carter had one of the saddlebag purses that were fashionable this year slung over her shoulder.

Actually, both of them would still attract second glances, uniforms or no. Blair wondered if Teal'c had picked up the Jags cap his last visit here.

"Detective Ellison," Davis said. "I know this must seem like an invasion of your home. I hope we won't be here long. Dr. Sandburg -- it is Dr. Sandburg now, isn't it? My congratulations."

"Man. Glad to know my academic progress is so interesting to the Pentagon," Blair snapped back, which wasn't at all what he'd meant to say. He saw Jim turn his head momentarily, and he shrugged in apology. Really, it had just slipped out.

Teal'c inclined his head to Jim and then said, "Blair Sandburg."

"Teal'c," Blair said. He was watching Jim, who fell back a step at Teal'c's proximity.

"I am glad to have the opportunity to tell you that I regret the circumstances of our first meeting," Teal'c announced. "I trust you have been well."

"Oh, yeah. Fine. Great, actually."

"It _is_ good to see you again," Major Carter shook his and Jim's hands in turn, smiling a lower-watt version of that astonishing smile of hers. "Actually, this may be the breakthrough we've been waiting for. I've got some ideas about tracking the Revenuers, but up until now we haven't had any opportunity to test them. What I'd like to do is set up here first, since we know for certain they were present at least twice on Christmas day, and then as soon as it gets light, head out to this crime scene where Detective Ellison, you sensed their recent presence."

"You're going to track them," Jim said. A hint of incredulity colored his words. "Creatures that don't even -- how in the world do you plan to accomplish that?" His posture was a little stiff, and he was pointedly not looking in Teal'c's direction.

"Well, obviously I don't know for sure, but based on our experience with the Revenuers I suspect their manifestations probably generate a distinctive EM field. Specifically we're probably looking for high energy particles, protons, maybe some helium nuclei --"

"Major," Davis interrupted, apologetic and formal. "I would think this is on a need-to-know basis only."

"_What?_" Blair demanded.

"Right," Jim said quietly. "If you'll excuse me. Sandburg can help you with anything you need." And without another word he retreated up the stairs. Blair watched, torn between wanting to follow him and staying to give vent to the frustration that had been building all day.

Venting won out and he whirled on Davis. "I don't believe this. Jim and I were in this thing from the beginning. We've both seen enough to land us in the psych ward a dozen times over, and you still won't tell us squat? Like you said, it's our home that's been invaded and our lives that are being disrupted, and you people are treating us like we're the security risk here."

Davis had a diplomat's smile, neutral and placatory. Even more infuriating to Blair, his eyes were deeply sympathetic. "Technically, yes, you _are_ a security risk."

"You've got to be kidding. Jim was a Ranger. Special Ops."

"Well, in general you're considered the greater risk, Dr. Sandburg."

"Me?" Some of the wind went out of Blair's sails. "This doesn't have anything to do with my mom, does it?"

Davis's smile became genuine. "The intelligence community has a long memory, and I'm afraid Naomi Sandburg's role in distributing copies of the Pentagon Papers while the Ellsbergs were in hiding hasn't been forgotten."

"Oh." It shouldn't have been a surprise, but Blair's legs felt rubbery and he sat down hard on the couch all the same. "Well, cool," he said dully. "Mom's pretty proud of that herself." He took a deep breath. "I still don't get treating Jim like this. Not only do you need him, but he's already proved himself a hundred times over. He's a hero, man. Don't tell me anyone can question that."

"Are you sure you want to discuss this now? I can assure you that we _are_ very grateful to you and Detective Ellison for your assistance, and these are decisions that I had no part in making."

"Just the messenger? Right, I hear that. Tell me anyway."

"Major Carter, Teal'c, would you please excuse us for a moment?"

"Of course," Carter looked startled but she stood up immediately. "We'll just wait in the hall."

"What?" Blair protested. "No. Don't go. There's nothing you could tell me that I'm ashamed of. If you're gonna say it, say it in front of everyone."

Davis shrugged apologetically. He looked honestly pained. "Again, please understand these are official policies and have nothing to do with my personal feelings."

Then Blair knew what was coming, but he let Major Davis go ahead and say it all the same.

"Detective Ellison is considered compromised because he's a homosexual."

"You know that, do you?" Blair noticed that his voice didn't really sound like his own anymore.

Davis had the grace to hesitate for a moment before saying, "According to the report that was given to me, he's been involved in a sexual relationship with you at least since the beginning of this year. Is our intelligence wrong?"

"You son of a bitch," Blair said quietly, without real rancor. He pulled his legs up onto the couch and wrapped his arms around his knees. He desperately wanted to go to Jim, but he wasn't sure he could face him right now. "Aw, _Jesus_, man."

* * *

Angel was still on his rather desperately mellow kick, Cordelia observed as she stalked into the lobby. And yeah, that was great and all, and it beat the heck out of the not-quite-evil-but-such-an-asshole-he-might-as-well-be version of the past months, but still. A little of the growly business might not be entirely unwelcome right now. He was sitting behind the reception desk and appeared to be valiantly trying to concentrate on the bookkeeping while Wes and Gunn practiced their free throws on a basketball net hung from the second story balustrade. Wesley missed the bounce on the marble floor, and suddenly the ball was caroming straight for Cordelia's face.

She caught it handily and passed it to Gunn. "If that had broken a nail or, God forbid, hit me in the _face_, none of you would be leaving this room alive. And isn't that net a little high?"

"Cordy!" Gunn said cheerfully. "Good to see you too, girl." He passed the ball to Wesley, who at least had the grace to look faintly abashed and drop the ball on a chair. Cordelia ignored him.

"Listen up, people, I have an announcement to make."

"Is something the matter?" Angel put aside the ledger.

"Oh, you could say that, all right. The dress rehearsal for _King in Yellow_ is tomorrow night, and I swear to God, the whole thing is a total and complete disaster. People don't know their lines, they're missing their cues, screwing up the blocking -- it's like some kind of horrible, horrible nightmare. It got so bad that even _I_ wasn't hitting my mark, which was absolutely not my fault, because what am I supposed to do when everyone else is blundering around like the pathetic, whiny amateurs they are? God!" She sat down hard on the nearest sofa and waited.

Silence. The three men exchanged glances. "Well," Wes finally ventured. "Isn't it a bit of old show business lore that a poor dress rehearsal portends an excellent opening night?"

"Well, yes," Cordelia agreed with exaggerated patience. "But this isn't the dress rehearsal. This is me having spent eight weeks of my life on a production that isn't going to get me any recognition at all, except maybe recognition for being the biggest idiot in the lamest show of the season."

Another silence. Then Angel said carefully, "Does that mean you'd rather we _didn't_ come to opening night?"

If Cordelia hadn't known better, she would almost have thought his tone sounded faintly ... hopeful. "Oh, no," she announced firmly. "If I'm going down in flames, I expect my friends to be there afterwards to pick up the pieces."

Then she felt a sudden, sharp instant of disorientation. Earthquake, she thought, and she looked up to see if the chandeliers were swaying. "Hey, did you guys --"

"Mixed metaphor, Cordy," Angel interrupted. He was rising from behind the reception desk. "But we can do pieces, if that's what you really want."

Something about his tone sent a cold shiver up her spine. "Excuse me?" she snapped, frightened without knowing why. "I was saying something here."

Angel continued to rise, and something was definitely very, very wrong, because Angel was a tall guy, but he wasn't _that_ tall. Either he was levitating or his legs were growing longer and really, neither was a particularly acceptable alternative. "Angel?" she whispered.

Then, although she didn't see him move, suddenly he was standing on the reception desk, and he held a broadsword in both hands. She heard Wesley shout in protest but it would have been more helpful if he'd done something -- anything -- even pitched the damned basketball.

Angel swooped down, his heavy blade cleaving the air. She heard the wind of its passing, but didn't feel the sword at her throat.

* * *

When Daniel first awoke, he thought he was simply tangled up in the sheets.

He tried gingerly to free himself without disturbing Jack, but eventually realized the problem wasn't the bedclothes. His own pants were bunched around his ankles, and he was still wearing his shoes.

He dropped his head back on the pillow. So the two of them had popped off like a couple of teenagers, and then immediately fallen asleep like the not-teenagers-anymore they really were. He thought he should probably be embarrassed, but the most he could feel was a sense of faint bemusement.

That, and a sweet, sweet warmth that would probably make him cry if he thought about it too much.

He didn't know if kissing Jack back last night had been the bravest or the most cowardly thing he'd ever done, but he didn't regret it. He would have done anything to wipe that expression of crestfallen mortification off Jack's face, happily gone to the ends of the galaxy to bring back Jack's shy smile.

Jack didn't want him to go to the ends of the galaxy, though. He just wanted to give Daniel kisses that were as tender as his dear Sha'uri's had been.

Turned out he was pretty much OK with that, Daniel thought to himself in the darkness, dazed but happy. The bare memory of Jack's hands on his body made him feel electrified. He remembered Jack's shaky laughter as they tried to wrestle Daniel out of his clothes, and Jack's sigh of contentment and pleasure when they wrapped themselves around each other. He remembered lying belly to belly with Jack, heaving and stroking and kissing with frantic eagerness, and he wanted to wake Jack up and try everything all over again and more. Maybe without the shoes this time.

Instead he resigned himself to lying awake in the wet spot with his shoes on as Jack slumbered beside him. This wasn't so bad at all, not really, because who knew what the morning would bring? They probably needed to talk, and then this could all be over. Best to enjoy the moment while it lasted.

Time must have passed though Daniel wasn't aware of it, because he felt his body suddenly flinch as though he were on the verge of dropping off to sleep. Jack stirred beside him and put his hand on Daniel's shoulder.

"Hey," Daniel whispered happily, and Jack murmured something in return and spooned up behind him, draping one arm over Daniel's waist and burying his face against the juncture of his neck and shoulder. Jack felt wonderful, his ticklish breath sending goosebumps down his spine, the warmth of his body snuggled up close chasing the shivers away again. Daniel arched and pressed eagerly back and didn't resist when Jack eased him over onto his stomach and pulled him up to his knees. He felt a flutter of fear, but it was subsumed by a dizzying swell of desire.

Jack slid one hand down, his fingers cold and slick enough to make Daniel flinch. He stroked and pressed until Daniel relaxed into his touch, and he spread his other hand across Daniel's chest. Daniel began to tremble and looked down at himself, and although the room was in darkness, he could see Jack's hand glowing with a faint phosphorescence.

Of course, he realized an instant later, that wasn't Jack's hand at all. The fingers were pudgy and soft and cold as the grave, and the face pressed against Daniel's neck was flabby and utterly featureless. No jaw line, no cheekbone, no nose. The genitals slapping against the back of his thigh were a wet, limply malformed wad of flesh, and despite Daniel's frantic struggles, the thing at his back continued to pad and pet him with mute, blind persistence.

He bucked violently, hampered by his tethered ankles, and tried to scream. From somewhere nearby he heard Jack's voice, and with a final wild effort managed to fling himself out of bed. He hit the floor with a thud that knocked the breath out of him. The room seemed to pitch forward, and then lean, muscular arms were around him, pulling him up, holding him close. "Daniel, that wasn't me," Jack moaned in a hoarse voice, hugging him desperately. "I swear to Christ, that wasn't me."

* * *

When Blair finally came upstairs he found Jim stretched out on the bed, shoes kicked off and one arm flung across his eyes. He swung his legs around and sat up at Blair's approach.

"Jim," Blair spread his hands helplessly. He couldn't imagine what to say.

Jim smiled at him, albeit ruefully. "Ready to get on that plane to Vermont now?" he asked.

"God, Jim." Blair couldn't laugh. "Did you know?"

He shrugged. "I thought it was a possibility. I'm sorry, Chief. I had no idea it would blindside you like this."

"No, I should have known. I just -- aw, man, I'm so fucking naive it never even crossed my mind. When you said things could get bad, I thought you meant, you know, bullets and ray guns."

"Still a possibility."

"It'd almost be a relief at this point," Blair said miserably. He dropped onto the edge of the bed beside Jim . "I can't believe -- I'm sorry. I should have known. I'm so sorry."

"Stop it. You've got nothing to be sorry for."

"But you --"

"No." Jim leaned forward and kissed him with slow deliberation. Blair worried at first that they could be seen from downstairs, but then he thought to hell with it and kissed Jim back. Feeling suddenly lightheaded, he fell more deeply into the kiss.

Jim was the one who suddenly sat back.

"Jim?"

He held up a quieting hand and Blair shut up.

"God _damn_ them," Jim snapped. "Stay here," he ordered peremptorily.

"What? What's going on?"

"Just stay here." Jim was already halfway down the stairs. "You bastards," he was saying in a flat voice. "You fucking bastards."

"Detective Ellison," Davis said calmly. "I'm going to have to ask you to put down your weapon and stay right where you are."

Jim stopped. "I'm not carrying."

From where he stood at railing, Blair saw the front door suddenly flung open wide, and he heard the back door being smashed down a moment later. The living room filled with armed, uniformed men.

"Detective," Davis repeated. "Please don't make this any more difficult than it already is. I know you don't want Dr. Sandburg to get hurt."

"I don't want anyone to get hurt," Jim said, talking just as calmly and slowly as Davis. He raised his hands, but otherwise stood absolutely still. "Just tell me what you need me to do."

"Put down your weapon."

"He doesn't have a weapon," Blair insisted. "His service revolver is up here on the dresser."

At that, all the guns in the place swung up to point in Blair's direction. Every soldier's face was dimpled and gray, without eyes or nose or mouth. "Jim!" he cried in horror, and he saw quick flashes of light and heard thunder. His legs gave out and he sat down hard on the floor. Jim was screaming, and Blair wanted to reassure him, but he couldn't manage to form words. "Stand down!" Davis was yelling. "Dammit, stand down! Don't shoot the sentinel!"

Thank God, Blair thought, weak with relief. He was hurting and desperately tired. His hand hovered before the blood spatters across his chest. Jim was at his side an instant later.

"Aw, Chief," he whispered. He put his hands on Blair's shoulders and eased him down. "Take it easy. You're gonna be just fine."

"I know," Blair murmured. He closed his eyes, hearing Jim shout for paramedics. Then he felt Jim's cheek laid against his own, heard him whispering.

"Hang on, Blair. Please, please."

He tried to tell Jim that he loved him, but his tongue was too thick in his mouth to form words. The world had begun to sway and Blair supposed this was death, and frankly, man, once again it sucked.

The world stopped. He drew a breath of air that didn't hurt, and opened his eyes. Jim jerked upright above him and stared down at him. "Sandburg?" His eyes filled with sudden tears and he snatched Blair up in a bone-crushing hug.

Blair patted his back weakly. "I'm OK," he said, amazed. "I thought I got shot. Jim, those soldiers --"

Jim released him slowly, cupping Blair's face with his hands for a moment, then spreading his right hand over his chest. There were no bullet holes; there was no blood. "They're not here," Jim said.

Footsteps came pounding up the stairs. Davis, Teal'c and Carter. "Dr. Sandburg," Davis panted. Amazingly, he still held onto shreds of his diplomatic reserve. "You're not hurt."

"No," Blair said. He stumbled to his feet with Jim's help.

Jim turned on them. "What the _hell_ are you people playing at?"

For his part, Blair was pretty certain that Major Davis had no more idea what was going on than he or Jim. His face was dead white, and the way he was leaning against the wall, he'd probably be on the floor by now without its support. "I didn't give that order," Davis said, his voice wavering just a little. "I don't know who those men were."

"I do not believe those were real airmen," Teal'c announced seriously. "For one thing, they appeared to have no faces."

* * *

The lobby spun around and around Cordelia, and when it finally came to a rest, Angel had already killed Gunn. Old habits died hard, and Angel had used the broadsword to stake him through the heart even though with a weapon that size, a thrust anywhere through the torso presumably would have done the trick. Gunn was only human. He lay sprawled on the marble floor, sightless eyes staring up at the basketball net hanging from the balustrade.

At least, Cordelia hoped his eyes were sightless. After all, _she_ could still see, and it was just profoundly, fundamentally wrong that anyone should ever be able to observe the curve of her back and the soles of her own shoes from across the room.

"You _bastard_," Wesley was red-faced and weeping with rage. "You monstrous, godless, inhuman _bastard._" He flung himself weaponless at Angel, and Cordelia prayed it would be over quickly.

"Wanna play?" Angel smiled. He dropped the sword and clotheslined Wesley, forearm to the throat. Wes dropped like a stone. Angel knelt over him, still smiling. "This is what you've wanted all along, isn't it?" he asked, his hands plucking at Wesley's fly.

Wesley fought back furiously until Angel yanked his shirt up and punched two fingers into the fresh scar under his ribs. Wes couldn't even scream. He grunted, writhing weakly as Angel yanked his jeans down and pushed his knee back to his chest. "Guess this is your lucky day," Angel said as he lowered his head.

He took his time chewing through the soft flesh of Wesley's inner thigh. Someone walked up to the two of them on the floor and stood over them without interfering as Wesley thrashed in agony. All Cordelia could see of the stranger were his worn shoes and baggy, colorless pants, the cuffs trampled and dirty. At last a bright fountain of arterial blood spouted upward, rising and falling in time with the beating of Wesley's failing heart.

Cordelia felt a hard jolt, and when she opened her eyes again, all she could see was the marble floor, which was not all that clean, but at least it wasn't awash in blood like she expected. She tried to push herself to a sitting position before remembering she couldn't do that anymore, but to her astonished relief, her limbs obeyed her after all. It still wasn't easy to find the courage to look over her shoulder.

Gunn was sitting up as slowly as she had done, his hand on his unskewered chest. Angel was huddled up a short distance from Wes, slackjawed and crazy-eyed with shock, and Wes wasn't much better, still lying on his back and weeping softly, rubbing his palm in disbelief back and forth over the unblemished flesh of his thigh. She averted her eyes to give him privacy, realizing at the same time that she didn't seem to be able to stop touching her own throat to reassure herself she was still in one piece. There was no sign of the stranger.

"So, OK," she at last, because it didn't look like anybody else was planning to speak up anytime soon. "What the hell was that all about?"

* * *

> When I was small, I was at the academy, where I learned the scribal art from the tablets of Sumer and Akkad. None of the nobles could write on clay as I could. There where people regularly went for tutelage in the scribal art, I qualified fully in subtraction, addition, reckoning and accounting. The fair Nanibgal, Nisaba, provided me amply with knowledge and comprehension. I am an experienced scribe who does not neglect a thing.
> 
> A praise poem of Shulgi (Shulgi B)

* * *

Well, Teal'c certainly hadn't mentioned _that_ part of Jaffa am'mit legends, Daniel thought.

In fact, Teal'c had said things wouldn't get really bad until the am'mit started to get chatty. Lovely thought there, that the worst was yet to come. Another hard, involuntary shudder of revulsion snaked down Daniel's spine, and Jack tightened his arm around his shoulders and then pretended to be simply adjusting the blanket. "Come on. Hold it together," he said gently.

"I'm OK," Daniel nodded quickly. "I'm OK. Just a little -- uh, surprised."

"Makes two of us," Jack muttered. "Christ."

Daniel squeezed his eyes shut. He was trying to remember what his life had been like before Shifu's dream and before the Light, but he no longer had any clear recollection of who that Daniel Jackson could have been. What had he thought about before falling asleep at night? When he first awoke in the morning?

What had he dreamed about?

He remembered his grief for Sha'uri, and a creeping sense of shame as the passage of time inevitably dulled the sharp, hot horror of her death, but he couldn't remember or even imagine what else had filled his mind during those months besides work. Had there been _anything_?

Now when he closed his eyes he saw the terrible spaces between the stars, and when he dreamed, he dreamed of the temple on P3X-636 and of the thing that slept in darkness, and when he awoke, he thought first of how he would see the goa'uld humbled once more by their ancient hosts.

"Come on, Daniel. Look at me."

Daniel opened his eyes. Jack must be going nuts with impatience, but after coaxing Daniel into telling him whether the thing in their bed was really gone, and if there was any hope of chasing or catching it, he had bundled Daniel into a blanket and was waiting for Daniel to tell him the rest. He even believed Daniel would tell him the truth.

In fact, Daniel thought with a bleak sense of wonder, despite everything, Jack looked at this hollow man and saw someone that he wanted. Maybe even loved.

"You in there?" Jack asked.

Daniel honestly didn't know, but he nodded.

"We need to tell Carter and Teal'c about that thing. They have to know what we're dealing with as soon as possible."

"I know," Daniel whispered, just as Jack's cellphone began to ring on the bedside table.

* * *

It was chilly on the balcony at two a.m. Blair crossed his arms over his chest and wished he'd grabbed a sweater before stepping out. The window opened behind him, and for a moment the sounds from their living room washed over him. Davis and Carter both on the phone, the instruments set up beside the staircase beeping and humming. Blair thought the magnetic fields in the radiation detectors were probably bothering Jim, but when he'd asked about them, Jim had snapped that they weren't nearly as annoying as Blair wearing a hole through the floor with his pacing. Then he'd yanked Blair back and hugged him hard, once again laying his hand over Blair's chest to reassure himself before letting him go.

Blair could take a hint all the same.

Teal'c stepped out onto the balcony behind Blair. Closing the window he announced, "The smell of salt water is quite refreshing."

Blair couldn't help a faint smile. "Yeah."

Teal'c interpreted this as an invitation and took up a position beside him at the brick balustrade. "Are you recovered from the effects of our shared hallucination?"

"Is that what they're calling it now?

"That is what Major Davis is calling the experience. Major Carter has expressed concern that such nomenclature is a contradiction in terms."

"She's probably right. But I'm fine."

"And Detective Ellison as well?"

"He's great, too."

"You are angry," Teal'c observed.

"No I'm not. OK, I am. Or maybe not so much angry as frustrated."

"That is certainly an understandable emotional response." A pause, and then Teal'c tried again. "Detective Ellison is frustrated as well."

"Actually, I think his background gives him a little more patience in dealing the military than I have."

"He is uncomfortable around me."

Blair was momentarily surprised by the observation. "Maybe," he finally agreed.

"He is aware of my symbiote."

Blair shrugged. "He's seen it, so yeah, he's aware of it."

"I was referring to his heightened senses. I have wondered whether he is actually capable of hearing or otherwise perceiving its presence."

Blair stared out towards the bay, thinking about the fact that these people knew so damn much about Jim and wouldn't share anything of themselves. "You've read my dissertation?"

"I have."

"Ah."

"Detective Ellison is a true warrior."

Not an assessment of Jim's life and abilities that Blair particularly liked, but clearly Teal'c intended it as a high compliment, so he nodded instead of protesting.

"And you love him deeply."

Well, Teal'c certainly to specialize in conversation stoppers. Blair finally managed, "I do." And then, "That's not in the dissertation."

"On the contrary." Teal'c stood at parade rest, looking out at the night lights on the bay. "Your high regard is entirely apparent throughout."

"Excuse me." The window had opened again, and this time Major Carter stood on the threshold. "Dr. Sandburg, if you don't mind, I need to ask you a few more questions about your sighting in front of the supermarket the other morning."

"It's Blair. That's what you were calling me before." Blair turned away, feeling a slightly absurd impulse to shake Teal'c's hand. "I'll be right there."

* * *

"The agony was ... quite overwhelming," Wesley said thoughtfully. "The sensation of teeth tearing through my flesh was very nearly enough to --"

"Do you _have_ to do that?" Angel snapped. He leaned over the desk and pulled the little dictaphone from Wesley's hand, snapping off the "record" button before giving it back to him.

"That was uncalled for," Wesley protested.

Angel immediately looked guilty. "Everyone already knows what happened," he mumbled in his defense.

"Ah, but that's the thing. Right now it may be clear enough in our minds, but visions and manifestations are notoriously difficult to retain over the long term with any degree of clarity. Confronted with the patently impossible, the human mind almost immediately begins to construct alternative explanations. Therefore it's vitally important that we capture our first impressions as accurately as possible."

"Two things," Angel said. "First of all, I'm not human, so I don't have a human mind. And secondly, what we saw -- what we _experienced_ \-- isn't exactly impossible."

"_Tell_ me about it," Cordelia agreed with perhaps more feeling than the situation demanded. "What?" she asked when everyone turned to look at her. "It's not like Angel's inner Hannibal Lector is some big secret or something."

"Cordy's right," Angel said. "I've got to get away from here."

"Wait a minute, man," Gunn stood up quickly. "What do you mean by that?"

"I mean, I'm packing up my old kit bag and I'm getting the hell out of Dodge. That was obviously a prophecy. Some kind of warning. "

"Wait, wait, wait," Cordelia got in front of Angel before he could ascend the stairs. "You can't just _leave_. That's crazy."

"No," he said patiently. "Crazy would be waiting around here until the prophecy comes true."

"Oh, you're just going to leave so that when you turn all evil you'll be chowing down on complete strangers instead of on your friends? Well, maybe the part of me that hopes I don't get my head lopped off is all for that, but on the other hand, Angel, come on." Her voice softened. "It sort of defeats the whole concept of, you know, helping the helpless. That whole hero gig, you know? "

Angel looked away from her.

"And we really have no evidence at all that what we experienced was a warning, much less a prophecy," Wesley pressed on. "That person--that faceless creature who was standing above us-- who was he? What did his presence mean? We simply don't have enough information to do anything more than hypothesize at this point."

"Know something?" Gunn said. "I'm sure that wasn't no prophecy. Think about it. In real life, there just ain't no _way_ Angel could've taken me down."

* * *

Denver's Books and Esoterica was in a storefront just off Hollywood Boulevard. Jack had to drive nearly four blocks north to find a parking place, finally stopping in front of an apartment building whose crumbling Moorish face was almost completely hidden by overgrown clumps of banana trees. Only then, once he'd put the rental car in park, did he finally say what he'd been thinking all this time.

"That damned monster was in your _room_?"

Daniel sighed to himself. Of all the times for Jack to decide to talk.

He had told most of the truth when Sam called last night with news of their own sighting, and Jack had sat on the bed and stared at him like he'd never seen Daniel before in his life. Afterwards he'd brusquely ordered him to go to sleep and said that he would wake Daniel up in two hours to take the last watch of the night, as if they were on an alien world instead of in a Santa Monica hotel room.

True to his word Jack had awaken him from a surprisingly sound sleep two hours later, and Daniel had waited for dawn sitting in an uncomfortable hotel room chair while Jack slumbered alone in the bed where they'd made love. In the morning they went running along the boardwalk again and then negated the healthful benefits of their jog by having coffee and beignets for breakfast. They checked in with Carter once more before driving to Hollywood, and Jack barely said two words about last night.

Until now. "Christ, Daniel. You let me lay some cheap moves on you because I'm too damned stupid to tell the difference between bedroom eyes and sheer terror --"

"Jack --"

"Why didn't you say something? What the hell were you thinking?"

"I don't know. Probably that I wasn't about to turn down the best offer I'd had in about five years."

Jack snorted. Taking off his sunglasses, he rubbed his eyes with his fingers as though he were suddenly very tired. "Crazy as a fucking loon. You've been seeing that thing for weeks now? _Months_? And you didn't tell me?"

It was getting hot sitting in the car. Daniel swung his door open. "Yeah. Well. You know what happens to loons."

"Aw, for chrissakes --" Jack started to reach for him, but let his hand drop. That's why he'd chosen to do this in public, Daniel thought. So there would be no touching. No shouting.

"Daniel," Jack tried again, his voice sounding stilted with swallowed hurt. "Machello's bugs -- you said you'd forgiven me. No, you said you didn't blame me."

"And I don't. I never blamed you. You were trying to take care of me, I know that. And if I'd told you I'd started hallucinating eight or ten weeks ago, maybe the best way to take care of me _would_ have been to lock me away from my books, but this was just too important to let you do that, Jack. I'm more certain than ever. The Revenuers could be the key to defeating the goa'uld for once and for all, so don't tell me that _you_ of all people can't appreciate how that's more important than any personal considerations."

He got out of the car without waiting for Jack to answer, but when he turned around to pull his briefcase out of the back, Jack was still sitting rigid behind the steering wheel, his face as neutral as he could make it.

"But it turned out it wasn't just your private hallucination," Jack said. "You don't know what's going on. Nobody knows what's going on now. In fact, you may have endangered us all and god knows how many innocents by deciding you knew how to handle this all by yourself."

"I didn't think anyone else would ever see it." As an excuse, Daniel had to admit, that sounded pretty weak.

"Newsflash, Danny. You were wrong."

"I know that now."

"Do you? Do you really? One minute you're all curled up next to me," Jack's voice dropped to less than a whisper, "And the next it's like I'm trapped in this fucking nightmare. I was praying it _was_ a nightmare. You were so trusting, and I couldn't warn you --"

Jack broke off. He wrestled the key out of the ignition with entirely unnecessary force, swung himself out of the rental car and slammed the door behind himself.

"Hey," Daniel said. "I'm all right."

"Well, maybe I'm not," Jack snarled back, and took off stalking back down the street to the bookstore. Daniel followed him without a word.

The tiny store was sandwiched between a pawn shop and a guitar store, its front door and windows so covered with fliers and community announcements for HIV+ support groups and tarot readings, band appearances and poetry nights that Daniel could barely see the bookshelves within. He tried the door and found it locked. "He said he'd be here by nine."

Jack looked at his watch and then knocked.

"And anyway," Daniel said quietly, as a figure came around the stacks and approached the door from within. "They weren't, uh, cheap moves, Jack. They were ... nice."

Jack's head snapped around, and for a moment, the expression in his eyes was so open and surprised Daniel wanted to kiss him right there on the street. He made do with a smile, and Jack muttered, "Really?" and almost smiled back.

The man in the bookstore unlocked the front door but didn't open it for them. After a moment's hesitation Daniel pushed the door open himself and stuck his head in. "Hello?"

The bookstore seemed very dim after the bright April sunshine, and it took Daniel's eyes a moment to adjust. The shop was long and narrow. Bookshelves lined the walls two stories high, a spiral staircase in a back corner climbing to a catwalk that ran around the upper levels. At Daniel's greeting, the ginger-haired man who had unlocked the door for them hunched his shoulders and didn't look back. "If you're waiting for an invitation," he said, "You're gonna be waiting out there for a damned long time."

Daniel exchanged a shrug with Jack, and then stepped in.

"Mr. Denver? I'm Daniel Jackson. We talked yesterday. This is Jack O'Neill, and we --"

"_I_ talked to you yesterday," the man snapped, finally turning around. He had pale blue eyes and could have been any age between forty and sixty. "Denver was my partner. He's been dead for two months now."

"Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't know. So you're --"

"He was staked by a vampire," the man said.

"Isn't it usually the other way around?" Jack asked cheerfully. Daniel shot him a look, and Jack shrugged, unrepentant.

Denver's former partner didn't take offense. "A vampire with a sense of irony," he agreed. "That's when you're in trouble. Most of 'em are just predators, you know, stupid, hungry animals, but every now and then the dark side of nature throws up a sport like that evil bitch. She didn't even feed on him."

Jack had begun humming the Twilight Zone theme very, very softly to himself. Daniel pressed on, raising his voice slightly. "I'm very sorry about your partner. I, uh, guess I didn't get your name."

"Bill," said the ginger-haired man. "I didn't correct you yesterday because I don't always feel like talking about Denver. I'm Bill Rice."

"I appreciate your taking the time to meet us. Do you have the Ishakidu manuscript here?"

"Beautiful piece. Ancient Sumerian on translucent green alabaster. Five by five columns, a hundred and three lines of formal archaizing cuneiform script of extremely high quality. It's been tentatively dated at around 3100 BCE. You mind telling me how you heard about it originally, Dr. Jackson?"

"It's cross-referenced in Miskatonic's collection catalogue. I understand Randolph Carter deeded it to Denver's father in the early nineteen thirties."

"Gift from one scholar to another," Bill said, his expression becoming somewhat more gentle. "This way." He led Daniel and Jack back past stacks of books and magazines, incense, crystals and other, less identifiable paraphernalia, and finally around a Japanese screen at the back of the store which partitioned off a very small living area. There was a neatly made-up camp bed in the corner with a tiny sink beside it, a four-by-four foot office safe that probably dated back to the Depression, and a rolltop desk too crammed with papers to ever be shut. Stacked on top of the safe were a hot pad and an electric kettle, red cans of soup and a jar of instant coffee.

Daniel thought about a five thousand year old manuscript being kept in these surroundings and had to clench his teeth to avoid making any comment. Jack, on the other hand, was looking more cheerful than Daniel had seen him all morning, and Daniel suspected it was because he never, ever intended to let Daniel forget this.

"Here we go." Bill swung open the safe and pulled out a leather-bound notebook with yellowing pages, which he handed to Daniel with a flourish.

Daniel took it dubiously, looked down at it, and then back at Bill. "This, uh, isn't the Ishakidu manuscript."

"Yes, it is."

"Um." Daniel turned the notebook in his hand. "No, it isn't."

"I'm no archaeologist," Jack drawled, "but that doesn't look like translucent green alabaster to me."

"It's Randolph Carter's own transcription. It's not generally known that that he was an excellent draughtsman in addition to his other skills."

Daniel opened the book at random. True to the bookseller's word, the pages were covered with painstakingly carefully pencil sketches of a cuneiform tablet. "Mr. Rice," Daniel said carefully. "Bill. I flew here from Colorado because I understood you had the Ishakidu manuscript itself, and that you were prepared to let me to examine it. Not to see a reproduction, no matter how well done."

"Randolph Carter's notes are completely accurate, down to the last verbal infix."

"Randolph Carter also believed the Salem graveyards were infested with flesh-eating ghouls." Daniel was trying hard not to lose his temper. "Surely you can understand that without being able to judge the authenticity of the original manuscript for myself, much less the accuracy of Carter's copy, these notes are useless to me."

"You expected me to just _show_ you the Ishakidu MS?"

Daniel shot a quick glance at Jack, who was rocking back on his heels, hands in his pockets and a placid not-smile on his face, obviously enjoying this whole thing far too much. "Yes, actually I did."

"Oh, right," Bill threw his hands in the air. "Someone calls me up out of the blue claiming to be Daniel Jackson --"

"'Claiming to be'?" Jack mouthed to Daniel, his eyebrows going up. Obviously, from Jack's point of view this just kept getting better and better.

"--asks to see a fantastically rare and dangerous magical text, and I'm supposed to just have it here in the shop waiting for him?"

Daniel blinked, considering. "Would you like to see some ID?"

The bell over the front door of the shop jingled, but Bill paid no attention to it, dismissing Daniel's offer with a contemptuous wave of his hand. "Like the government couldn't mock up any kind of identification you wanted."

"Bill?" called a voice from the front of the shop. "Are you home?"

"I'm taking a tremendous risk even showing you Carter's notes." Bill snatched them back out of Daniel's hands. "I think it's time for you to go now. And don't bother sending any more government spooks."

"Bill." The customer had made his way to the back of the shop. "What's going on?"

"These gentlemen were just leaving."

"Now wait a minute," Jack finally interrupted. "I'm sure if everyone just calms down we can get this whole thing straightened out."

"If you don't get out of my shop right now I'm calling the police."

"Oh, my goodness," said the new customer, and Daniel glanced around at him for the first time. Tall and thin, with a slight limp and the pallor of a man getting over a long illness. He was in blue jeans and a two-day-old beard, but the linen shirt tucked into his jeans was freshly ironed and, if the points on his collar were any way to judge, probably starched as well.

"Bill, this really is Daniel Jackson," the stranger exclaimed. "I thought that was you last night at the Raj, Dr. Jackson, but I wasn't absolutely positive, or I certainly would have introduced myself then." He stuck out his hand.

Somewhat dazedly, Daniel shook hands with the man.

"This is such an honor," the stranger said. "Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, at your service, sir."

> No place let it remain in one number. Add and diminish until The Stars be numbered. Arise! Move! And appear before The Covenant of His Mouth Which He hath sworn Unto us in His justice. Open the Mysteries of Your Creation And make us Partakers of The Undefiled Knowledge.
> 
> John Dee (1527-1608), _The Calls of the Thirty Aethyrs_

* * *

"I feel like a goddammed bloodhound," Jim growled.

It was his first complaint all morning, and Blair was relieved to hear it. Frankly, the way Jim had been quietly going along with whatever the Feds asked him to do had been starting to freak him out.

"Personally," Blair murmured back happily, "I'm still waiting to see a full blown Sherlock Holmes routine from you. You know, throwing yourself to the ground and following a scent on your belly."

"You can just keep waiting," Jim said, but Blair thought he saw a quick smile all the same. Then Jim's head twitched fractionally, and he put his hand to the side of his head.

"What?"

Jim's lips thinned. "Nothing."

"Their instruments are bugging you, aren't they?"

"Maybe. I don't know. Carter said the electrical field --"

"I know, I heard. She thinks that if you can watch a color TV, then you shouldn't be bothered by the electrical field her muon detector's putting out, but you know what, man? She doesn't know squat about sentinels and besides, you're not usually watching television while you're trying to track signs of extraterrestrial life. I'm gonna tell her to turn the damned thing off."

Jim nodded once, and Blair squeezed his arm. "Just hang on for me, OK?" He turned and jogged back to join the rest of their little parade. Carter, Teal'c, and Davis were several hundred feet back, and further back still were the lead detective on the case and the captain of the 8th Precinct, as well as the patrolman who'd been first on the scene two days ago. Their procession through the alleys and back yards of Tacoma Heights had attracted an audience, and people were standing on their front porches and watching through their windows with frank curiosity. Quite the parade. No wonder Jim was feeling self-conscious.

"Hey," he said, when he was close enough to talk without shouting. "Your gadget's bothering Jim. You're going to have to turn that off if you want him to have a hope of finding anything."

Carter looked simultaneously fascinated and disappointed. She turned the small gray device in her hand. "Are you sure it's not something else in the environment? I'd prefer to have a real-time confirmation of anything that Detective Ellison finds."

"No, it's your detector. Speaking of, I've been to the astrophysics lab at Rainier a time or two, and the toys _they_ use to measure cosmic rays fill up a room. And you expect me to believe you can do the same thing with something that looks like a PDA?"

She grinned from ear to ear. "It's hard for me to believe sometimes, too. When I was just a year out of the Academy I spent three months on an icebreaker cruising up near the arctic circle. We had a neutrino monitor on board and I thought it was just about the coolest thing in the world."

Blair had to smile back. "Sounds like big fun, all right."

Then he caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye.

Spinning around, he took off running as hard as he could. He heard Teal'c shout, but all Blair could pay attention to was the sight of Jim on the ground, both arms flung up over his face. Oh, God, oh, God, he'd _told_ Jim to stay put --

He ran into a spider web spun across the alley just as he reached Jim. He ignored it, falling to his knees at Jim's side, but as he reached out for him he suddenly realized the fine strands of the web hadn't brushed across his _face_ at all. Sticky threads of memory and vision ghosted across his mind, and he saw the oyster-faced soldiers raising their guns and the darkness of the predawn sky over the grocery store parking lot. Music was playing, a song from a corny old musical, and in the shadows something which had lain sleeping for a very long time finally began to stir.

It wasn't a spider web. It was ice, infinitesimal shards darting through his mind like the neutrinos Major Carter was trying to detect, and he would have told her, "Here, they're right here and they're tearing me to shreds," but he couldn't talk, not while he was trying to get to Jim.

The sharp fragments of vision ended as suddenly as they'd begun. "Jim," he croaked.

Warm hands cradled his head. "Do not attempt to move."

"Jim," Blair said again, thrashing a little as he tried to get up. He could see a chain-link fence and Teal'c's downturned face and the haze of clouds that covered the sky. "Dammit, where's Jim?"

"He is here." Teal'c stopped trying to restrain him and helped him up, his arm around Blair's shoulders. True to Teal'c's word, Jim was on the ground beside him with Major Davis crouched nearby. Davis had one hand on Jim's shoulder, the other under his skull to protect his head from the pavement, and he was undoubtedly ruining that razor sharp crease in his trousers.

"Easy," Davis said. He looked white with shock or surprise, but his voice was level. "Please take it easy, Detective Ellison. Help will be here in just a minute. Major Carter, do you have _anything_?"

"I'm checking," she said, but Blair ignored them all, crawling to Jim's side. Jim's eyes were open, and he managed a crooked smile for Blair. "Chief."

"Goddammit," Blair groaned in relief. He took Jim's hand in both his own and clutched it against his chest. "Are you all right?"

"Little dizzy," Jim conceded in a hoarse voice. "Headache. Sandburg, they've called for paramedics. I can hear the siren. Get them to send them away. I can't handle --"

"I know you don't like it, but I'd rather have you checked out. Please, man?"

"I'm all right. Help me sit up."

"I don't think that's a good idea," Davis said, his voice unexpectedly firm. "I felt the tail end of that myself, and I'm no sentinel."

"Indeed," Teal'c agreed. He wasn't making any moves yet to stand up either.

"Are you all right?" Carter asked.

"My symbiote is extremely agitated. Did you obtain any documentation of what happened here?"

"No. Darn it, no, I don't have anything but normal background radiation. And I was so sure we could track the phenomenon."

"Help me sit up," Jim demanded again. "I don't want to --" he broke off, and Blair leaned down close.

"You don't want to what?"

"I don't want to lie here looking up at the sky," Jim muttered in a half-shamed whisper, and Blair understood that one hundred percent. He nodded to Davis and the two of them eased Jim up. As soon as he was sitting he became visibly calmer.

Davis on the other hand was wide-eyed and anything but calm. "Dr. Sandburg, _I_ don't want to look up at the sky either. What the hell's going on here?"

"You're asking me?"

Davis lifted his hand, palm up, to demonstrate it was still shaking. "I've never felt anything like that. It was like something physical, but it shook loose all these memories. Images. Things I've never seen before. And now --" He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. "Dammit, this must be what agoraphobia is like. I can't shake the feeling that there's something up there."

"I didn't feel anything." Carter sounded disappointed. "I got here just a second later and I didn't feel a thing."

"It's splintered," Jim said quietly. "Yesterday it was this discrete blob of -- of something. Of nothing. And today it's a million pieces all over the place. Worse. Like it's breaking up existence as it goes." Jim propped his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. "Listen to me. Jesus. I sound like a lunatic."

"I felt it, too." Blair put his hand on Jim's shoulder. "If you're crazy then we're all going down together here."

Jim looked up. "If I were you," he said bleakly to Davis, "I'd be checking local hospitals and psych wards. We may not be the only ones experiencing this. The same with what happened last night."

A concrete goal seemed to buck Major Davis right up. He gave a tight nod. "You're right. If there's a public health threat we need to document it as soon as possible."

"Look," Blair interrupted, because he had to try. "You felt that. So did Teal'c. So did I. Obviously you don't need Jim to play canary in the mineshaft anymore, so while you're on the phone to your superiors, why don't you let them know you can carry on without our help, OK?"

"Sandburg." Jim shook his head a little. "You felt that. If there's anything --"

"But Jim --"

"If there's anything I can do to help, you know I have to try."

* * *

"I'm sure you don't remember," Wesley continued enthusiastically, "but I saw you give a lecture at Queens while I was reading classics. This must have been, what, ninety-two, maybe? Ninety-three? Your critique of Sethe's _Hieroglyphische Urkunden der griechisch-romischen Zeit_ was absolutely _devastating._" He grinned at the memory. "I don't know if anyone ever told you that was one of the required texts for examination that year. Professor Banes was sitting in the corner fuming all the way through your talk."

"Oh, I heard about it," Daniel said dryly. "He tried to have me banned from Griffith Library."

"I can hardly believe the man could have been so petty over an academic dispute," Wesley disagreed. "But did he really? Incredible. Bill, hearing Dr. Jackson speak was practically a life changing experience for me. I'm quite serious. We'd all been saying for years that Colonel Howard-Vyse's inscriptions in the King's chamber were a forgery, but it took someone with Dr. Jackson's credentials to finally be taken seriously. Considering his work in Ancient Egyptian, not to mention his role in reopening KV5 and his work in early airborne site-mapping, when this man stood up told the world the fourth dynasty pharaohs couldn't have built the great pyramids, the academic community finally had to stop and pay attention."

"No," Daniel squinted, and he looked down so he wouldn't have to meet Jack's eye. "Actually, no, they didn't."

"Well, my apologies for being so cautious, Dr. Jackson," Bill said. "You can understand why I was nervous, though. I get a call from a man who supposedly died six years ago --"

"Funny thing, that," Wesley interrupted, still in the throes of his hero worship. "When the greatly-exaggerated rumors of your death got out, people said it was because you helped rediscover KV5. You must know the story that Howard Carter didn't reseal the opening in 1903 because he was unaware of the importance of the tomb, but because he was afraid of Ramses' curse, and your disappearance proved he was right, and oh dear, I _am_ sorry. This is in dreadful taste, isn't it? You must forgive me." He turned to Jack. "I'm afraid I didn't get your name."

"Jack O'Neill."

Daniel looked up at the tone of Jack's voice.

"Ah. Well, hello." Wesley said cautiously. "Are you a linguist as well?"

"I'm Dr. Jackson's bodyguard."

"Oh?" Daniel said in utter amazement.

"I see." Wesley eased a step backwards to demonstrate that he wasn't infringing on Daniel's personal space. "A not-unwise precaution, given everything that's been going on."

"Everything that's been going on?" Jack said. "And that would be what, exactly?"

Wesley and Bill exchanged a glance. "You do know you're not the first person to ask about the Ishakidu MS," Bill said.

"Someone who claimed they were from the government also wanted to see it," Jack said. "I gathered that. How long ago was this? Did you show it to them?"

"They contacted Denver just a few days before he died. As far as I know, he allowed them to examine Randolph Carter's notebook but not the actual MS. There've been two break-ins since then, and then last night --" Bill drew a shaking hand across his forehead. "I don't know what you folks saw, but I was in the back here reading when I felt this jolt --"

"Yes, that seems to be a characteristic of everyone who experienced something," Wesley agreed. "I thought it was the beginnings of an earthquake, too."

"I got up and ran under the door frame in back here for shelter in case books started falling." Bill got up to demonstrate. "You see? From here I can see all the way up to the front of the store. Then I heard a sound. I looked up and it was Denver at the front door, big as life, tapping on the glass with the back of his knuckles like he used to do when he'd go out and forget his key. Oh, God."

Bill suddenly looked to Daniel much closer to sixty than forty after all. He reached out to give the bookseller a hand as he lowered himself back into the chair. "There was someone with him, though. I think that's the only reason I didn't open the door. There was someone looking over his shoulder."

"The creature we've all seen," Wesley said. "Fat, white corpse fingers and no face. Bill, can I get you something? How about a cup of tea?"

"I'll be fine." He sat slumped in his chair. "You don't last long in our business without getting used to far worse, eh?"

"Well, last night was no walk in the park," Wesley said with a tight smile.

"How many people have you talked to about this?" Daniel interrupted. He felt an odd tightness in his chest, as though he'd been running uphill for a long time. "Just how many people do you think saw that apparition?"

"I've done some checking around this morning and I've found half a dozen or so folks with similar stories. I don't know what the common denominator was -- maybe just that they were awake at two in the morning. Vampire, demon, human, it doesn't seem to have made much difference."

"The vampires and demons saw it too, did they?" Jack said, very seriously. Daniel could have kicked him.

Wesley became more guarded. "You believe you know something about this? _Is_ it related to the Ishakidu manuscript?"

"I don't know. Maybe after I see it I'll know more." Daniel spoke up fast before Jack could get a word in. "Time may well be of the essence," he added optimistically.

Bill and Wesley exchanged a long glance, and Wesley said at last, "It _is_ Daniel Jackson," as though his name were a talisman. "Who else would we show it to?"

"You're right," Bill agreed. "I wouldn't even know where to begin looking, myself. And if there's a chance -- Yes. It's for the best."

"Very good. Dr. Jackson, I can take you to the manuscript," Wesley said briskly. "I've been keeping it at my office ever since the first break-in here. Here's my card --" he produced one from a small silver case, and with a glance at Jack first, carefully broadcasting his inoffensive intentions, he handed it directly to Daniel. "It's not far from here, but if you're not familiar with the neighborhood you can follow me over. My bike's right outside."

"Thank you," Daniel said, feeling a little giddy. Since last night everything had been getting bigger and bigger, revelations tumbling into revelations, and the possibility of finally learning something concrete about the goa'uld's former hosts after so many months seemed to make every risk worthwhile. It was all connected (messily, irrationally, and only in his own mind, he knew) with Jack's touch and Jack's kisses, and he felt a sharp, sweet pang of arousal, as though it would be the most natural thing in the world to push Jack back onto Bill's neatly made-up camp bed right now and kiss him until their lips were bruised.

And evidently, Daniel thought mildly, he was losing his mind. "Thank you, yes," he said to Wesley. "Can we go right now?"

"Oh, Dr. Jackson," Jack interrupted. "May I have a word with you outside first?"

"Jack --"

"We'll just be a minute," Jack explained politely, and since he looked entirely prepared to create a scene if necessary, Daniel repeated, "Just a minute, I apologize," to Wesley and Bill and followed Jack through the shop and out the front door. As soon it swung shut, the little bell tinkling behind them, he said, "Jack, in case you haven't noticed, those two are a little on the paranoid side, and if you --"

"You've got groupies," Jack said. "How come you never told me you had groupies?"

"This Wyndam-Pryce person isn't a groupie. He's just ... all right. It's true one of the reasons I had trouble getting people to take my conclusions seriously despite a bedrock-solid archeological record behind any theory I ever advanced --"

"Daniel," Jack said, suddenly gentle. "I know you were right. You don't have to convince me."

He loved this man, Daniel thought, and didn't know if he should be despairing or shouting it from the rooftops. Jesus, he loved him so much it _hurt._

"A lot of the stuff I was saying really wasn't so different from things secret history conspiracy theorists had been saying for decades, that occultists and alchemists had been writing about in the West for five hundred years, that Eastern writers had been saying for the past four or five millennia. It makes sense, of course. If memories of the Revenuers can be found in our earliest literature, it stands to reason the goa'uld occupation of earth, which took place so much more recently, would have left its impression as well."

"And what does this have to do with the groupies?"

"When I started publishing about the age of the great pyramids, it caught the attention of some pseudo-archeologists. Occultists like Wyndam-Pryce. Apparently I made an impression."

"Apparently so. Can you think of any reason why we should trust either of those two nutballs?"

Daniel blinked, wondering what in the world Jack was getting at. "Why shouldn't we? They're going to show us the manuscript."

"Daniel. As soon as we arrived this morning a complete stranger wandered in and offered to lead us only god knows where --"

"It's right off Highland, actually," Daniel said, looking at the business card.

"My point is it's a classic ambush tactic."

"Good thing I've got a bodyguard along, then. Jeez, what in the world were you --"

"Daniel. They believe in vampires. And demons. And God only knows what else."

"Yes," Daniel said with exaggerated patience. "More or less exactly the sort of people you might expect to have a collection of rare occult texts."

The little doorbell rang again and Wesley poked his head out, smiling and hopeful. "Well then. Are we ready to go?"

* * *

> "Methought a Being more than vast, in size beyond all bounds, called out my name and saith: What wouldst thou hear and see, and what hast thou in mind to learn and know?"
> 
> The Corpus Hermeticum I (1906 G.R.S. Mead translation)

* * *

The hair was shorter, the shoulders broader, he knew how to clean and fire an M9 and his aim wasn't any worse than half the airmen on the base. What's more, if someone tried to shove him ass-down in the sand, Jack hoped odds were at least even these days that Daniel might actually shove back.

One thing hadn't changed, though. All these years later, he was still full of shit.

"What do you _mean_ you can't read it?"

Wesley had been startled by Jack's tone of voice, but Daniel didn't even look up. "I mean I can't read it. This is Archaic Sumerian. What did you expect?"

Jack had to bite down on his first response since Wesley was still in the room with them. "Actually, Daniel, I expected you would be, I don't know, able to _read_ it."

"It's Archaic Sumerian," Daniel repeated patiently. "No one can read it. We can make more or less intelligent guesses, but the language itself is very poorly understood."

"The problem is that there's just so little extant material," Wesley put in helpfully.

Jack glared at him. Wesley smiled back nervously, but held his ground. "What complicates the situation is the fact that what texts do exist are almost entirely business records or school copy exercises. It's a shame that the Ishakidu manuscript can't be made more widely accessible to Sumerian scholars, since it seems to be one of the longest complete narratives in the language, but obviously it's just too dangerous."

"Because it's magic," Jack said. Daniel glanced up, his eyes full of warning, but Jack was feeling cranky. "Dangerous, powerful magic. Despite the fact that no one can actually read it."

"I can hardly believe you're unaware of this manuscript's potential importance. Abdul Alhazred may have had access to this while he was composing the _Al Azif_ itself, and the sequence of logograms that appear in the Ishakidu MS are fundamental to works as diverse as the _Corpus Hermetica_ and _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_."

Wesley was all but waving his arms around in his excitement, but Daniel had once more bent low over this holy grail, protected in a collector's case of non-reflective glass. "He's right, Jack," he said, not argumentatively, simply enthralled. "Even untranslatable, even _unknown_ for most of western history, I think this may have been an incredibly influential piece of writing."

Jack took a deep breath. "Look," he finally told Wesley. "Can you give us just a minute here?"

"What? Oh. Of course. I-- Right. I'll just be --" he jerked his thumb over his shoulder and left the small library.

Jack sank down into a chair next to Daniel. "No more bullshitting," he said mildly. "Can this thing really help us?"

Daniel pointed to a line of cuneiform near the bottom of the first column. The smooth green alabaster was dull under incandescent lights, and Jack had an irrational desire to see it in the sunlight. "Look at these signs, Jack. _Ud, ab, e, u._ This is the same sequence I would pin to my chest whenever I went to sleep all those months I was, um ... trying to figure out how to deal with the effects of the Light. I found them in an early Fifteenth Century alchemical text, back before I'd even heard of the Ishakidu MS, and Jack, they _worked._ Ask Jim Ellison if you don't believe me. He could feel the weight of them."

"Uh-huh. So you can read little pieces of it then? What does this bit mean?"

"'Screaming in protest, the demon departs by the window.'"

Jack raised his eyebrows. "Okay. And the demon is -- what? A goa'uld? A Revenuer? Is 'window' kinda symbolic here?"

"It could also mean, 'Bread grown in the light nourishes us in the darkness.'"

Jack thought he already saw where this was going, but said gamely all the same, "Little more obscure there."

"Or 'The chicken sleeps in the storm,' or even "Water flows from its' -- hm, niche, niche ... probably underground watercourse of some kind. Say, 'Water flows from a well to fuck the land."

"OK, stop. Just, stop. The bottom line is, you really can't read this, so what good does it do us?"

Daniel crossed his arms over his chest. "No, I can't read it yet. But I've had more experience with various offshoots of Archaic Sumerian over the past four years than anyone else alive on earth, and as it turns out, Jack, I'm pretty good with languages. So if you'll give me some time, it's quite possible that I may be able to figure out enough of this to give you some answers. "

"How much time are we talking about here? Hours? Days? _Weeks_?"

"I don't know."

Jack looked at him. Daniel looked right back, not budging an inch, and Jack was visited with the unwanted, unwelcome memory of stolen kisses against the hotel room door.

Daniel's mouth open under his own. Soft, warm lips that soon became so slick and so wet as they slid against Jack's.

Christ. He wiped his hand over his mouth as though that could wipe away the memory as well, at least for the moment. When he decided to screw something up, he went straight for the big time, didn't he? "I'm going to call Carter and tell her what's going on, which, right now, would be basically nothing. If they're not having any more luck than we are, there's no reason for them to stay in Cascade any longer. "

"Hm-mm," Daniel said, already hauling out his laptop and obviously a million miles away. Jack left him there, walking out into the lobby of the old hotel Wesley claimed was his office. He thought being here in this building was another reason he felt so impatient and frustrated with Daniel. The damned place gave him the heebie jeebies for some reason.

Correction, he knew exactly why this place got under his skin. Since their arrival he hadn't been able to shake a creepy suspicion that he already knew what the upper floors looked like, and since he'd never been here before in his life, the idea was patently ridiculous, and ridiculous things tended to make him cranky.

"Does Dr. Jackson need anything?" Wesley pounced from his office behind reception desk. "I'm no linguist, of course, but I do have some reference materials that might be of use to him."

Daniel's one-man fan club here was starting to get on his nerves as well. "I'm sure if Dr. Jackson needs anything, we'll be the first to know. Look, I need to make a phone call. Is there some place where I won't be interrupted?"

"Oh, of course. There's a private courtyard right through here." He led Jack through the lobby when a voice called from the landing.

"Wesley, you around? I've just had a call from Kate. She's been talking to one of her friends on the force."

"Right here, but Angel --"

The man coming down the stairs talked on, heading for the coffee maker with a single-minded determination that reminded Jack a little of Daniel.

"--and that mess I walked into the other night, where that seamstress had attacked her own baby? Turns out that wasn't an isolated incident at all, just the only one the media happened to get ahold of. Yesterday afternoon an au pair in Brentwood managed to stop her employer before she could start deboning her baby with a three hundred dollar hollow ground edge santoku knife, and just last night at a neighborhood block party in Diamond Bar, a woman and her husband actually tried to lay their kid on the barbecue grill. That one'll probably make the evening news if it's not in this morning's paper." He turned around at last. "How long has this coffee been sitting on the burner anyway?"

He finally turned around, holding out the coffee cup, and saw that he had an audience.

"Hello," he said, hardly missing a beat, and set the coffee down on the counter, just a little too close to the edge. He shoved it back before it could fall. "I didn't realize we had guests." He looked at Wes, who spread his hands apologetically.

"Jack O'Neill, this is Angel."

"As in Angel Investigations," Jack said.

"Right." Angel smiled a little, looking faintly embarrassed. "We thought it was, uh, kind of catchy."

Jack felt his hackles rising at that smile. Self-deprecation was a learned trait for this man, he had absolutely no doubt. The hunched shoulders, the slight clumsiness with the coffee cup, all an act to make himself look harmless.

After all, Jack thought, he should know. He'd done the same thing himself often enough.


	5. Chapter 5

> "Satanic music is not heavy metal rock and roll ... occult is what no one ever listens to anymore, songs that once were popular but now are long forgotten, such as 'Telstar' and 'Yes, We Have No Bananas.' Playing them releases their suppressed power."
> 
> Anton LaVey (quoted in Wright: Saints and Sinners, 1993)

* * *

_Finally,_ Blair thought, shutting and locking the door behind himself. They wouldn't be gone long, but even a few hours of privacy was a relief. It rankled that Jim didn't have the security clearance to be included in the meeting with the liaison from McChord at the local FBI field office, but from what Blair had gathered, they were principally going to be coordinating information requests to hospitals and police departments, and if Major Davis and the Joint Chiefs themselves wanted to exclude Jim and Blair from _that_ particular bureaucratic thicket, well then, more power to them.

Besides, Jim was still shaky from the encounter this morning in Tacoma Heights, and he could use the sleep.

Then Blair turned and saw Jim was wide awake and padding down the stairs, bare-chested and barefoot in his blue jeans. He didn't think Jim had even lain down yet.

"Aw, man," he complained gently, intercepting Jim at the bottom of the stairs. "You're supposed to be getting some sleep."

"That's what you keep telling me," Jim agreed with a small smile, and then he cut off Blair's reply by ducking his head and kissing his mouth.

Blair was marshalling his arguments even as he kissed Jim back, but Jim wrapped his arms around his back and pulled him close, and Blair stopped thinking about arguing. Stretching up on tiptoe so Jim wouldn't have to bend down, he steadied himself with his hands on Jim's shoulders. Then he gave way completely and put his arms around Jim's neck. The last twenty-four hours were ephemeral as a nightmare, but Jim was warm and solid and real against him, and he moaned soft, hungry, happy sounds as Blair kissed him.

They kissed until Blair was lightheaded and off-balance, and when he swayed in Jim's embrace, Jim turned him with the easy strength he so seldom used when they were together and walked him backwards to the sofa while Blair laughed and protested again that Jim was supposed to be _resting_.

"You're so keen on resting, Sandburg, why don't you try it?" Jim asked, amused, and proceeded to push Blair down onto the sofa and climb on top of him. "Go ahead. Get a little shut-eye why you can," he said, his voice so breathy against his neck that Blair squirmed and laughed helplessly under him. Jim shoved his shirt up and popped open the buttons on his jeans and when he put his hand on him, Blair heard his own giggles turn into moans.

Jim's kisses became softer as he drove Blair harder, and when Blair was gasping too frantically to kiss him anymore, Jim whispered in his ear, "For me, Chief. C'mon, c'mon."

Blair panted and arched his back, straining blindly. His thighs trembled with irresistible weakness, and when he collapsed the world went white and sharp and sweet. By the time he could open his eyes again, Jim was watching him, and Blair couldn't make out his expression.

Still shaking, he pulled Jim's head down and kissed him, but when he reached for Jim in turn, Jim caught his hand and folded it back between them.

"What?" Blair said, a whisper of alarm sparking across nerves that were still lazy with pleasure. "Jim, what is it, man?"

Jim smoothed Blair's hair back from his forehead and kissed his brow.

"Jim?" Blair asked again, starting to be frightened in earnest.

"They don't know what to do." Jim kissed his face again and nuzzled his cheek against Blair's. "No idea. They don't even know what they're fighting."

Blair managed a weak little laugh "They're military. No offence, man, but what else is new?"

Jim's smile was so sad. "Right." He kissed Blair again, soft and lingering.

"What, you think this is _it_?" Blair whispered when Jim finally lifted his head. "Because of what happened last night? This morning up in Tacoma Heights? Say goodnight Gracie for _real_? Jesus, come on. You can't possibly know that. It's way weird and it's freaking me out too, but Jim, we've seen weird before now."

Instead of answering him, Jim scooted down until he could lay his head on Blair's chest. Blair stroked his head, trying to calm his racing thoughts, to think of something to shake Jim out of this terrifying fatalism, but before he'd come up with anything Jim whispered, "Chief, I can still feel it. _Here._" He touched his own forehead.

"God, Jim --"

"Shh," Jim said. He worked his arms under Blair's back and settled down with a long sigh. "Rest. Just for a little while."

* * *

"So you're interested in the sudden rise in cannibalism, too?" Jack asked Angel, being as obnoxious as he could. "I understand you people have been having the nightmares as well. Got any idea what's really going on or how widespread it is? Because speaking just for me, it's really starting to give me the creeps."

"I'm sorry -- Jack." As he'd predicted, Angel's hunched shoulders straightened and his foolish smile disappeared immediately. "What's your interest in all this?"

"Angel," Wes stepped forward quickly. "Jack's here with Dr. Daniel Jackson."

"Who?"

Jack supposed it was petty of him to relieved that at least one person in Los Angeles had never heard of Daniel.

"Daniel Jackson. The Egyptologist. When he dropped out of view about five years ago, there was speculation it was due to his role in re-opening KV5."

"Not ringing any bells for me."

"Oh, I'm sure Giles would have mentioned it. There was serious concern that the curse of Ramses had been let loose upon world."

"Five years ago, I only knew Giles by reputation," Angel said.

"The point is, Dr. Jackson may be able to read the Ishakidu manuscript."

"How did he find out about it in the first place?"

"He's studied at Miskatonic. Angel, he thinks the manuscript may have something to do with what happened last night."

"Even though he hasn't read it yet."

So he wasn't the only one to have noticed that little point, Jack thought.

"No one's read it yet. Not that we know of, anyway. Dr. Jackson's the best hope we have."

Angel appeared unconvinced, but he turned his attention back to Jack. "You a military man?" he asked.

The observation confirmed Jack's first impression of Angel. "Air Force," he said. "Once upon a time. I've retired."

"Right. You know what, Jack? I'm giving you exactly one warning." Angel moved like he had no bones under his skin at all, just muscle and sinew, and in the space of a breath he had crossed the polished floor and gotten close enough for Jack to see his marble complexion. There were no crows feet around his eyes, no lines on his forehead or around his mouth, but if this Angel person were really the callow youth his flawless features seemed to indicate, Jack would eat the braid off his dress uniform.

"If the Initiative sent you, you and your Egyptologist can pack your bags and get the hell out of my town." Angel mimed looking at a wristwatch. "You've got, oh, five seconds. Does that time table work for you?"

Jack raised an eyebrow. "What's the Initiative?"

Wesley quickly interposed himself. "Angel, he's here as Dr. Jackson's bodyguard."

"And that's supposed to convince me they're not military? We both know Denver and Bill made a mistake by showing a copy of manuscript to anyone who came around asking for it. How is this any different?"

"It's _Daniel Jackson_," Wesley said again. His faith in the power of that name was rather touching. "I've seen him hold his own against the established lights in his field, even when it could have cost him tenure, gotten him fired--" Wesley broke off. "The University of Chicago did fire him, didn't they?" He smiled weakly. "I'd forgotten, but when the news got out in archeological circles we took it as evidence of the curse. Angel, the point is, this is a man of bedrock integrity. I'd expect no less of his friends."

"Excuse me, I hate to interrupt the Mexican standoff here," said a woman's voice.

Jack turned. The woman stalking across the lobby to them was movie-star beautiful, as serenely confident in herself as a young Rita Hayworth. "Oh, you know, I never thought of it before, but is 'Mexican standoff' really kind of racist? What's so Mexican about it? This is more of an Anglo-guy standoff isn't it?"

Angel and Wesley fell back a step. Jack was fascinated to see them both looking sheepish. "Good morning, Cordelia," Wesley said. "This is Jack O'Neill."

"Hello," Jack said cautiously, and she immediately turned that camera-ready smile on him.

"You know, generally we invite new clients to sit down and offer them a cup of coffee instead of haranguing them in the lobby, but Angel's got his own special sense of customer relations."

She raised both eyebrows pointedly in Angel's direction, and the big man spread his hands in apology. "He isn't exactly a client," he tried to explain, but Wesley interrupted.

"He's here with Daniel Jackson, an archeologist who thinks he can translate --"

"Are you talking about Mr. Persistent Vegetative State? That's what I'm trying to tell you. Wes, that guy in the library looking at your prize rock didn't move a muscle when I came in."

"He's probably just engrossed in his translation. Archaic Sumerian is an extremely difficult language."

"Uh, I don't think so. The guy isn't even blinking. That's not what I would call engrossed, more like catatonic."

Jack had already taken off across the lobby. He skidded his way into the little library not knowing or caring whether the others were following, and found Daniel just where he'd left him, hunched forward over that damned engraved rock.

Cordelia was right; he wasn't blinking, but now it was because his eyes were tightly squeezed shut. His arms were crossed hard over his chest, and he was shaking like a leaf.

Jack swallowed. He half-knelt beside Daniel's chair, and said very gently, "Hey. You're supposed to be workin' in here, not catching forty winks."

Daniel exhaled noisily, but he didn't raise his head and he didn't open his eyes. "Jack."

"Right here." Jack put his hand on Daniel's arm.

A long silence followed, and when Jack couldn't stand it anymore he finally said, "You wanna tell me what's going on?"

Daniel laughed shakily. "So you can't hear it?"

Jack listened. All he could hear were traffic sounds from the street and the quiet shuffling of the three people watching silently from the doorway. "What am I supposed to be listening for?"

"Teal'c warned me," Daniel breathed. "You probably can't even see it, can you?"

A chill went down Jack's spine. He lifted his head and looked around himself. Angel was standing just inside the room, Wesley and Cordelia behind him. The bookshelves were crammed with volumes that had no titles printed on their leather spines, and the small room smelled of burnt coffee and old paper.

Jack realized suddenly music was playing somewhere, probably upstairs. He could only hear the faint thump of the percussion moving through the walls and floors above him.

"Is it the same thing you saw before?" he asked Daniel.

Daniel nodded once, tightly. "It's talking to me, Jack. I can't make it go away." Suddenly his eyes flew open and he clamped both hands over his ears. "Aw, Jack, please." He bolted to his feet, hands still covering his ears and still pleading brokenly for Jack's help.

Jack surged up with a curse, trying to reach him, but Daniel stumbled away blindly and as his knees buckled, Angel caught him and eased him to the floor as though he were weightless.

"Jesus, Danny," Jack muttered, frustrated and angry and frightened. This all reminded him much too much of P3X-636 and worse.

_Huddled barefoot into the corner of that terrible white room, eyes red from the drugs and from crying, frantic hands crammed under his chin to stop them from drawing mad signs in the air._

He knelt beside Daniel on the floor and pulled his hands away from his ears. Daniel looked up at him miserably. "Help me," Jack said. "Tell me what to do. Do you need me to get you away from here? Should I call Frasier? Daniel, you've got to tell me."

Wesley said, "I may be able to help." He took Angel's place at Daniel's other side, Angel seeming glad enough to back away. He looked as far out of depth as Jack felt, but Wesley seemed calm and competent as he said, "You must try to relax, Dr. Jackson." He gently removed Daniel's glasses and then put his hand over his eyes. "What kind of protection was he using?" he asked Jack.

For an insane moment all Jack could think was _none of your damn business_ and _we haven't even talked about that yet_, but he knew that couldn't be right so he clamped his jaws together and shook his head.

"Protection from the text itself," Wesley explained, a touch impatiently. "A charm or a spell to protect him while he works on the translation."

It was like being locked in the asylum with poor Daniel. People babbling utter nonsense at him and expecting a sensible answer in return.

"I've got no idea. Nothing. I don't know."

This time Wesley nodded in understanding, as though a mere bodyguard really couldn't have been expected to know anything. "Dr. Jackson, can you hear me? I need to know how you were protecting yourself. I can't risk interfering with any charms you may already have in place."

Daniel pushed Wesley's hand away from his face. "I understand you," he muttered thickly. "Help me up."

Jack nodded, and the two of them helped Daniel sit up against the wall. Daniel blinked cautiously, then rubbed his eyes with his fists like a sleepy child. "I'm all right," he said.

Oh, _of course_ you are, Jack thought in exasperation, but Wesley spoke first. "You don't see it anymore, do you?"

"It's gone," Daniel said quietly.

"Can you still hear it?"

This time it took him longer to answer. "I don't think so. No, I can't."

Wesley relaxed a little. "Good. Before you do any more work, we have to figure out why your defenses broke down so drastically. Were you using a charm? A conjuration? Even a simple hex should have --"

Daniel shook his head impatiently. His eyes were red-rimmed, but his breathing had begun to even out and he'd stopped shaking. "Nothing like that. It wouldn't have helped."

"Nothing?" Wesley sat back on his haunches. "What in the name of heaven were you thinking?"

"I've used a charm of sorts before," Daniel said defensively, "but it's like trying to work with an albatross around my neck. I can't concentrate."

"With all due respect, Dr. Jackson, I'm surprised you're not in a madhouse already."

"So what's going on here?" Angel demanded, looking from Wesley to Daniel. "What just happened?"

"Some magical texts are inherently dangerous," Wesley said. "Particular logogram sequences can have a serious cumulative effect on the reader's mind. Do you feel strong enough to get up off the floor, Dr. Jackson?" Daniel nodded, and Jack took one of his arms and Angel the other, pulling him to his feet and then helping him back to the chair. "The ordinary, stabilizing barriers can begin to break down," Wesley continued, "and the reader perceives the leakage between realities as an apparitional creature of some sort, a haunting, unwelcome familiar."

"Or as a human being?" Jack asked suddenly.

"In certain extreme cases, yes. Is that what you saw, Dr. Jackson?"

"It's what we've all seen," Jack said. "That thing with fat white corpse hands and no face."

"No," Wesley argued faintly. "No, that shouldn't be possible."

"Possible or not, it's what you saw, isn't it?"

Daniel nodded joylessly. "It's always been the same. A tattered man without a face."

"That figure should be a figment of your unconscious mind, a mere symbol of the mental stress to which you're subjecting yourself in the study of such powerful magicks," Wesley insisted. He found his way to the other chair in the room and sank down into it. "If people all over the city are seeing it as well, then the breakdown between dimensions must be equally widespread. Dear Lord."

"OK," Cordelia announced. "Am I the only person seriously unhappy with this whole deal? Dimensional barriers breaking down all over the city --"

"It's more widespread even than that," Daniel said. "Our friends in Cascade saw him too."

"Oh great. All over the West Coast, then. Has everyone but me forgotten that the dress rehearsal for _The King in Yellow_ is _tonight_? Are we going to have to postpone it for Armageddon?"

"Excuse me," Daniel said. "But who _are_ you?"

"I'm sorry." Wesley gestured vaguely. "My associates, Cordelia Chase and Angel."

Cordelia beamed. "Nice to meet you. Sorry about writing you off as Zombie Guy there a few minutes ago. I guess you didn't see me come in."

"No, I'm -- It's nice to meet you, too," Daniel finally said in a surreal attempt at normalcy before he abruptly turned back to Wesley. "Do you know a way to stop it long enough for me to finish the translation? I've been able to keep working up to now, but the voice --."

"Daniel," Jack protested at the same time Angel said, "Wes, maybe we need to talk about this."

"I think so," Wes said. "Any protection would be better than none at all."

"Wesley, a word outside, please?" Angel insisted.

Wesley got to his feet. "I'll just be a minute."

Once they were out of the room Jack turned on Daniel. Somewhere along the way he seemed to have completely lost control of this mission, and though he wasn't sure when or how, he had a nasty suspicion that it had probably been long before he and Daniel had ever gotten on the plane to Los Angeles. Maybe it had happened when he had agreed to the mission on P3X-636, but more probably things had been out of his hands since the moment Daniel had appeared out of thin air on Blair Sandburg's bedroom floor.

"How are you?" Jack asked. "Really."

"OK. A little shook up. Mostly OK."

"Second question. Why the hell are you doing this?"

"You know why we're doing this."

"That tablet may be the most complete record of the Revenuers on Earth, yadda, and if we learn how they defeated the goa'uld, maybe we can do it, too. I know that. What I mean is, are you seriously proposing to let one of these nutballs put a spell on you? C'mon Daniel, you can't tell me you believe any of this stuff. The Revenuers are real, and they're fucking dangerous. If they've left these sort of booby traps in their so called sacred texts, or whatever this is, then we need to confiscate it and examine it back at the mountain under safe, controlled conditions. Not here in the Magic Castle."

"I don't think Wesley's talking about magic, Jack. I mean he is, of course, but if it works, it's because what he's really doing is manipulating fragments of the Revenuer's knowledge left behind on earth when they left five thousand years ago. It's not magic. Just a technology we don't understand yet, and people like Wesley have had a lot more experience with it than you or I. Frankly, I think I'm safer here than I would be back at Cheyenne Mountain."

"Aw, for Chrissakes," Jack said in weary defeat as Wesley, Angel and Cordelia trooped back in. Angel looked as unhappy and skeptical as Jack felt, but Wesley smiled and rubbed his hands together in anticipation.

"A simple book conjuration ought to do the trick. Cordelia, you don't by chance have a bottle of that good eyeliner on you, do you?"

She put her hands on her hips. "Not again. Wesley, you promised after the last time that you would buy your own."

He winced in apology. "I know, but I can never remember the brand name when I'm at the chemist's."

"In the first place, on this planet we call them drugstores," Cordelia snapped. "And in the second place, I may be living in somewhat reduced circumstances, but it doesn't mean I've sunk to buying my makeup in drugstores. Do I look like Miss Covergirl to you?"

There was clearly no safe answer to that question so Wesley said, "Cordy, you know I get the cleanest line with yours, and in a delicate operation like this, there really is no margin for error."

She glared a moment longer, then rooted around in her purse with bad grace and yanked out a slender red tube that she slapped into Wesley's hand. "I'm submitting an expense report this time. Just so you know."

"Thank you. If you feel strong enough, Dr. Jackson, I'd like to move out into the lobby where there's more light for this."

Even Daniel was looking concerned by this point, but he nodded gamely and got to his feet. Cordelia told Jack cheerfully, "I know this all must seem kinda crazy, but Wes really does know his stuff. By the way, has anyone mentioned to you that we now accept Visa and Mastercard?"

This gang of _Twilight Zone_ refugees expected to be _paid_ for mounting a game of charades? What next? Table rapping? Crystal ball gazing? No doubt they'd be dimming the lights and pulling out a Oujia board next.

Daniel appeared committed, though, dutifully sitting down on one of the round couch-things while Wesley pulled up an ottoman and sat down facing him.

"What I'm going to do is paint the symbols of the four archangels on you," he waved the bottle of eyeliner, "while Angel reads the Conjuration of the Book from Agrippa. Simple, painless and in most cases, quite effective. If anything, Waite's English translation seems to work just as well as the medieval Latin. Are you quite prepared?"

"Uh, sure."

"All right. You'll need to take off your shirt, of course."

"Oh for crying out loud."

Even Daniel blinked, but then he shrugged, unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it off. "Undershirt too?" he asked, sounding a little forlorn, and if there were ever a time for Jack to step in and stop this, now was clearly it, but at Wesley's brisk nod, Daniel yanked his white T-shirt over his head and made a fumbling attempt to fold it before dropping it on the cushion beside him.

"One last thing, Dr. Jackson. If you'll take off your glasses so I can paint the first sign on your forehead."

Daniel obediently slid them off his nose and instinctively started to put them in his shirt pocket before remembering his naked chest. Jack took them from him. "Daniel," he said, meaning, _This is ridiculous. Please._

Daniel blinked myopically. "Brave new worlds, Jack. OK. I'm ready."

"Angel, if you'll begin," Wesley directed as he uncapped the tube of eyeliner.

Angel nodded in resignation, still looking unhappy, and began to read from a small red volume.

"I conjure thee to be useful and profitable unto all who shall have recourse to thee for the success of their affairs. I conjure thee anew, by the virtue of the Blood, to be serviceable unto all those who shall read thee."

Wesley proceeded to draw a small, asymmetrical figure in the middle of Daniel's forehead with a few deft strokes. The glossy brown eyeliner shone. "Lift your chin a little," he murmured quietly, and when Daniel obeyed, he sketched a second figure in the hollow of his throat.

"I conjure and command you, O Spirits, all and so many as ye aye, to accept this Book with good grace. In no circumstances shall you make any attempt upon the body, soul or spirit of the reader, nor inflict any harm on those who may accompany him, either by mutterings, tempests, noise, scandals, nor yet by lesion or by hindrance."

He drew the third sign over Daniel's heart, Daniel flinching a little at the first touch of the brush on his bare chest. For the last, Wesley pushed the ottoman away and squatted in front of Daniel to reach his stomach. The sight made the back of Jack's neck flush, and he had to look away. He heard a sound behind him and turned to see a stranger letting himself in and crossing the lobby towards them.

The newcomer was another child as young as Cordelia. He had an easy, rolling swagger and a lopsided smile, and he cocked his head towards them, eyebrows rising in question.

Cordelia whispered in Jack's ear, "It's OK. That's just Gunn." To Gunn himself she turned and put her finger over her lips.

"If ye obey me not, I will force you to abide in torments for a thousand years, as also if any one of you receive not this Book with entire resignation to the will of the reader." Angel finished and closed the red volume.

When he saw Wesley on his knees in front of Daniel, Gunn whispered to Cordelia in a voice that was perfectly audible to Jack, "Whoa, kinky."

Jack was ready to punch the guy, but Cordelia's silent glare quelled Gunn the same way it had Wesley and Angel, and he backed off with a shrug.

And that should do it," Wesley said, getting to his feet and recapping the bottle of eyeliner. "How do you feel?"

"Fine," Daniel said, and pitched forward face-first onto the floor.

* * *

> Will is the grand agent in the mystic progress; its rule is all potent over the nervous system. By Will the fleeting vision is fixed on tile treacherous waves of the astral Light; by Will the consciousness is impelled to commune with the divinity: vet there is not One Will, but three Wills--the Wills, namely, of the Divine, the Rational and Irrational Souls-to harmonize these is the difficulty.
> 
> William Wynn Wescott: The Chaldean Oracles Attributed To Zoroaster

* * *

If it had been up to Angel, none of this would have happened in the first place.

He wouldn't have struck up a conversation with a pair of complete strangers in Denver's old bookstore; he wouldn't have invited them home, and he certainly wouldn't have proceeded to hand over a rare and dangerous magical text to them, Daniel Jackson or no Daniel Jackson. Who had ever heard of a scholar running around with a bodyguard anyway? You wouldn't catch Giles with some military thug at his elbow.

Although it occurred to Angel a moment later that Giles did, in fact, have a sort of de facto bodyguard, he wasn't inclined to cut Jackson and O'Neill any slack on that account. O'Neill wasn't exactly the bodyguard type. Air Force? You could take one look at the man and know he'd been a pilot, not military security. Whatever he was doing here, it probably wasn't acting as Jackson's bodyguard. More like his handler, which raised the disturbing question of whom he was handling Jackson _for._

Angel wasn't getting a Wolfram and Hart stench off these two, but it didn't mean they weren't dangerous. Any fool could tell Jackson was a little unstable. Maybe a lot unstable, linguistic genius or not. After all, O'Neill had been upset when Jackson started babbling about invisible people and collapsed over his translation, but he hadn't seemed particularly surprised. This sort of thing probably happened all the time. Whether Jackson had been nuts to start with or his studies had driven him over the edge didn't matter. If it had been up to Angel, as soon as Jackson could walk again he would have shown both him and his keeper to the door.

The very last thing he would have done was begin casting spells in the hopes of keeping Jackson sane long enough to finish the translation.

But as Wesley and Cordelia had pointed out, Wesley with a politely regretful air, Cordy with a whiff of righteous glee, the decision wasn't Angel's to make anymore. Then they had gone right ahead done it, and in a severely misguided attempt to prove he really was a team player these days, Angel had been fool enough to read the spell for them.

Now Jackson was moaning and thrashing around on the floor while Cordy and Gunn tried to keep him from slamming his face against the marble or swallowing his own tongue. O'Neill looked angry enough to start tearing off heads, but he was as cool in a crisis as Angel would have expected him to be, grabbing his cell phone and explaining with machine-gun rapidity that he needed immediate medical attention for an adult male having convulsions. No history of epilepsy. No history of seizures. O'Neill's rage bled through only when he asked for the Hyperion's address and instead of answering Wesley said, "No, it's all right -- I think he's coming out of it now."

Even then O'Neill didn't raise his voice. "Give me your address before I have to fucking beat it out of you," he said calmly, and Angel was moving between the two men when Jackson croaked out O'Neill's name.

"I'm all right," he insisted, weakly pushing aside Gunn's and Cordelia's restraining hands. "Dammit, I'm all right."

"Hold that thought," O'Neill said to the 911 operator. "Jesus, Daniel, are you _trying_ to give me a damn heart attack?"

Jackson was shivering violently, cheeks wet with tears, white-faced and exhausted-looking. "Not my fault," he stammered through chattering teeth, sitting upright and flinching from any offers of help. "You said it wouldn't hurt," he complained to Wes.

"Well, that was a bit of a white lie," Wesley admitted, "but if you had expected it to be painful, you would have tensed up during the spell and negated its effectiveness."

"Daniel, you just had a seizure," O'Neill said. "I'm getting the paramedics."

"It wasn't a seizure," Daniel said. He curled forward slightly, one hand hovering before the now-smeared sign on his belly like it was a wound so severe he was afraid to touch it. "Just hurt so much there for a second I couldn't-- " He looked up at Wesley. "You lied to me," he said, sounding astonished and betrayed. "You _lied._"

Wesley drew himself up. "I performed the spell so that it would work," he said stiffly, but Angel thought he saw a flicker of guilt all the same. "Besides, Dr. Jackson --"

"After you've seen me rolling around on your floor, I think you can dispense with honorifics." He reached for O'Neill's arm and managed to stand upright with his support. "It's Daniel." He took the cell phone from O'Neill's hand, said into it, voice still quavering, "I'm fine now. Thanks anyway," and snapped the phone shut.

O'Neill glowered.

"Daniel," Wesley tried again. "You weren't wholly forthcoming yourself. How long have you been seeing your -- familiar? For weeks now? Months? I had no idea we were dealing with such a persistent apparition. The consequences could have been severe."

"Whoa," Gunn interrupted cheerfully. "Like they weren't already?"

Jackson blinked wearily at him. "Who _are_ you?"

"Hey, who're you?"

"All right, enough is enough," O'Neill said. "I'm about five seconds away from driving us straight back to the airport."

"Jack, you can't."

Angel supposed he should step in now, but if Wes and Cordy wanted to handle it their way, then Angel would let them handle it. Besides, he didn't think Jackson and O'Neill going back to where they'd come from was such a bad idea.

"Gunn," Wesley said, "This is Jack O'Neill and Daniel Jackson. Dr. Jackson -- Daniel -- is here because he thinks he can translate the Ishakidu manuscript."

"The _what_?"

"Oh, you know," Cordy said. "The big ol' green rock with writing on it that Wes is so proud of. You sure you're OK, Daniel? You were kinda frothing at the mouth there. Can I get you a drink of water or something?"

Jackson instinctively wiped the his mouth with the back of his hand. "I'm fine."

"I didn't mean you were actually frothing. Just a little drool, but you got it already. Anyway, the offer of water still stands."

Jackson wiped his mouth again, but he was clearly softening. "That would be nice. Thank you."

"No problem. Angel, do you mind?"

"Do I mind what?"

"Would you please get Dr. Jackson some water?"

"Uh, right. No problem. Twist of lemon?"

Daniel was gingerly pulling his shirt back on, moving like he wasn't entirely sure be sure he wouldn't fall over again twitching at any moment, but at Angel's tone he turned his head and blinked at him in vaguely hurt surprise.

"No," Angel said quickly. "I wasn't -- it was Cordelia, I was just --"

And now Cordelia was looking at him too, and there was nothing soft or hurt about _her_ expression.

"Never mind. I'll be right back." He fled, half-expecting Cordy to follow him, but she let him go in peace. For now, at least. She was probably going to wait until company was gone before reaming him a new one.

When he got back, carefully bearing a glass of water with a very thin slice scavenged from the last rather-dried up lime in the fridge, Cordelia and Gunn were alone in the lobby. Cordy tilted her head towards the office. "They're back at it. This time somebody'll be watching Daniel in case Wes's spell doesn't work out like it was supposed to." She took the water glass from him. "Why don't I take this in, since you can't really be trusted to be civil to the clients."

"Jackson's trying again? Is that safe?"

Cordy shrugged. "Wes seems OK with it."

"And O'Neill?"

"Pissed off. You know, I'd never have guessed he was a bodyguard. Not really the bouncer type, is he? Or hey, maybe he's Secret Service. You know, like in that Clint Eastwood movie? I could see that."

"You don't look too happy about those guys, period," Gunn said.

"Angel's been Mr. Personality since he got up this morning," Cordelia agreed. "You'd think he'd be glad somebody's shown up who can translate that precious rock."

"I just think the timing's a little coincidental," Angel was trying not to sound defensive. "And I don't understand why Wes is in such a hurry to trust them."

"Coincidental," Gunn said. "You mean you think they had something to do with what happened last night?"

"Jackson's been seeing the same creature who appeared during that vision. Prophecy. Whatever it was." With a stomach-churning rush of mingled lust and horror, Angel remembered the smell of Wesley's terror, the softness of the almost-hairless skin on his inner thigh. The taste of sweat and flesh. The soft, crunching _pop_ as his incisors broke the arterial wall.

"We agreed it wasn't prophecy," Cordelia interrupted angrily. "We all _agreed_."

And if wishes were horses, Angel thought, wiping a shaking hand over his forehead. "Did it seem like one of your visions? At all?"

Cordelia took a long drink from Daniel Jackson's glass of water. "Um, seriously? Not even. For one thing, no headache, which was a definite plus, even if I did, you know." She mimed cutting her throat. "And for another, you may remember this time we all got to share."

"I know all that," Angel said, frustrated by his inability to articulate the question. "I mean the quality of the experience. The subjective sense of reality ..."

He trailed off as Cordelia stared at him, eyebrows raised.

"Uh, never mind."

"When I have visions, I know they're visions," Cordelia said, betraying that she did after all understand what he was fumbling to say. "Last night I didn't have a clue that was happening wasn't actually _happening_ happening. I'm going to take this in to Daniel now before the ice melts."

"Cordy," Gunn said, pointing to the glass.

"Oh, damn." She tried to swipe the lipstick stain away with her thumb, but it left a smear of red on the lip of the glass that made Angel think of Wesley's blood spurting out in thick pulses.

_Filling his mouth. Bathing his face_

"Angel, are you all right?"

He wasn't about to answer that. "Cordy, when's the last time you _did_ have a vision?"

"What? I don't know. Probably last week. It's been pretty quiet lately, and I for one am not complaining. It's nice to have time to concentrate on my career without worrying about the Vision Girl schtick."

Gunn looked puzzled. "Last week? I don't remember that. Guess I wasn't around."

"I don't remember you having any visions last week," Angel said. "Or the week before that."

"Oh, of course I did." Cordelia sounded a little unsure of herself, though. "Remember that group of would-be elemental magicians trying to create an abyss experience in the West Hollywood IHOP?"

"That was almost a month ago," Angel said.

"No. That can't be right. Can it? Of course I've had visions since then. They've been getting so intense lately, and you all pretend like they're not scaring you, but ..." She trailed off, sinking down onto the sofa. "A _month_? How come we didn't notice?"

"Damn, girl," Gunn said gently. "Maybe we've just been too glad _not_ to have you flopping around in pain to question it."

She looked up at Angel. "How long have you known?" she asked shakily.

"It didn't occur to me until just now."

"Is it part of what Wes is so worried about? You know, barriers breaking down all over the place? Or maybe it's -- Angel, you think maybe they're gone for good?

"I don't know. We should talk to Wes."

"Later," Cordelia said firmly. "Let him get his precious archaic Sumerian translated first. If he and Dr. Jackson are right, it could explain everything and if not -- well, we've got plenty of time to figure out why something _isn't_ happening anymore, right?" She stood up. "This could be great. It's not like being an occasional conduit for the higher powers has any fringe benefits."

"Cordelia --"

She backed away from him. "Angel, no. I'm fine. And I've got a show to get ready for tonight. If you want to do something helpful, maybe you could get poor Dr. Jackson a glass of water, you think?"

* * *

> Looks like another perfect day  
> I love L.A.  
> 
> 
> Randy Newman (Trouble in Paradise, 1983)

"There's this great little place near the harbor." Dennis had told Paul Davis when he'd heard Paul was being sent to Cascade. Denny Needleman was a civilian contractor in Procurement with an office one corridor and five doors down from Paul's and a gourmand's knowledge of fine restaurants on both seaboards. "Finn's isn't much to look at on the outside, but if you make reservations before you go and mention my name, you might be able to get a table on Thursday night. They'll sear a salmon steak for you that'll make you cry like a baby, Paul. Like a goddammed _baby._

Paul had a brief, but extremely vivid mental image of himself crying like a baby in front of Teal'c and Major Carter, but made the reservation anyway.

As it turned out, anticipating that salmon steak had more or less gotten him through the rest of the day, because there were afternoons when you tried to save Planet Earth from an alien menace so lethal it had already devastated the Asgardian galaxy, while simultaneously attempting to keep the Russians in the dark and incidentally prevent a planet-wide panic, and then there were afternoons like _this_ one.

It was no surprise that the Cascade PD's top brass didn't much like the Feds. They weren't happy about the FBI inquiring into issues that were clearly matters for local jurisdiction, and the incidental presence of Air Force officers from McChord, NORAD, and the Pentagon wasn't making them any happier.

That was all right. Bringing unhappy people around to see his point of view was just part of Paul Davis' job description.

What really exhausted him was trying to do his job with one hand tied behind his back. He should have had a ready-made ally in Detective Ellison's captain -- and in fact he had, right up until the moment when he'd had to confess to Captain Simon Banks that his detective didn't have the necessary security clearances to be involved in this part of the investigation.

Captain Banks had shut down like a steel bear trap.

While he didn't directly accuse the USAF of having been responsible for Ellison's abduction on Christmas day, he nevertheless made it perfectly clear that as far as he was concerned, they could have done a lot more to prevent it, and incidentally, was Davis aware that tear-gassing Jim Ellison could have led to one very dead sentinel? What's more, Banks knew an ambulance had been called this morning, so evidently the Air Force was playing just as fast and loose with Ellison's life now as they had the last time around.

One word, just one word of complaint from Ellison, and Banks would make damn sure they were barred all future access to the man, Joint Chiefs or no Joint Chiefs.

It had been a very long afternoon.

Still, by the end of the day they had what they were looking for. There had been a spike in 911 calls at two a.m. the previous night, as well as a smattering of particularly grotesque child abuse reports scattered along the west coast during the past twenty-four hours. The latter was tough to quantify, of course, and Carter wouldn't venture to guess whether either was even statistically significant.

It wasn't a whole lot to go on. Their liaison from McChord had gone home clearly of the opinion that they were all nuts, as had Agent Biber from the FBI field office, and Paul didn't blame them. He hadn't mentioned Jim Ellison's self-reported experiences, of course, but frankly, they didn't make the case for an ongoing alien incursion much more persuasive.

All things being equal, Paul would have been glad to make his report and catch a plane back to Washington himself.

All things weren't equal, though. With his own eyes he had seen Ellison's apartment fill up with phantom, faceless airmen. The reek of gunpowder and blood when they shot Blair Sandburg had been as real as anything he'd ever experienced. More real than some of the things that had happened to him deep under Cheyenne Mountain, to tell the truth.

Then the earth had stuttered in its rotation and suddenly none of it had really happened at all, save for the brutal memories.

It got worse. Something, _something_ had brushed across Paul's mind in that alley up in Tacoma Heights. He still felt unsettled and off-balance, as though whatever had touched him had knocked a few neurons permanently awry. Concentrating on how fantastic that seared salmon steak was going to taste had beat the hell out of remembering how he had felt kneeling on the street cradling a sentinel's head in his hands while the universe whirled mindlessly above.

How ironic if the final threat to the planet didn't come through the stargate or in a fleet of goa'uld motherships at all. What if the end came simply as shadows and hallucinations, a spreading darkness the brightest sunlight couldn't banish. After all, the universe was so terribly, unfathomably _old_. Even the half-mythical Ancients themselves were childish upstarts measured against the sweep of creation. Who could say what manner of beings might have spun their way outwards with the sudden explosion of time and existence?

Older than the spaces between the stars.

If such impossibilities were coming -- if such things were already _here_ \-- then what chance did sanity have?

"You are very thoughtful, Major Davis," Teal'c observed.

Paul realized he had been sitting and watching the food on his plate get cold for who knows how long now. "No, I'm just thinking," he protested automatically, and Major Carter grinned at him across the table.

"I think that's what Teal'c just said."

"Ah. Right."

And after all this, they weren't even having heartbreakingly delicious salmon at Finn's. Teal'c had spotted a falafel stand during the drive downtown this morning, and had been talking about hummus all day. Apparently pureed chickpeas and tahini reminded him of a delicacy back on Chulak. Paul tried to suggest going to Finn's anyway, but he'd given up in the face of Teal'c restrained little half-smile of anticipation.

"It is indeed what I said, Major Davis." Paul thought the man was probably teasing him, but his expression remained absolutely deadpan. "Is the falafel not to your liking?"

"No, it's good." Paul struggled to pick his pita bread without getting cucumber yogurt sauce all over his fingers. "Is the hummus as good as they make it back on Chulak?"

"On Chulak it is called _mal'adz_, and it is prepared from the seedpods of an extremely bitter herb. It is, in fact, entirely unpalatable until seasoned with strongly flavored spices and even then is eaten only by those who have no other means of sustenance. Armies forced to live off the land, for instance, or the extremely impoverished."

Paul sat back. "So you don't even _like_ mal'adz?"

"Indeed not."

"But you like hummus?"

"It is tolerable. The flavor is considerably more mild."

Carter was smiling down at her salad, carefully spearing a cube of feta, a black olive, and a sliver of red onion on the tines of her fork. "Teal'c just wants to be sure he can survive on hummus in case civilization ends tomorrow."

"A prudent precaution," Teal'c said, deadpan as ever, and now Paul was sure they were both making fun of him. A falafel ball rolled out the side of his pita bread, spattering yogurt. He reached for a napkin, but the one on his lap was pretty far gone due to previous mishaps with the sauce. He should have just eaten the damn sandwich with a fork.

"I'm going to get some more napkins." He got to his feet. "Can I bring either of you anything?"

Carter handed her paper cup up to him. "A refill, if you don't mind? Thanks, Paul."

He made his way across the rough wooden planks of the dining patio to the front counter and got in line for Major Carter's refill. A group of teenagers were in front of him, and several of them turned to gape at his uniform. A girl with cropped red hair wearing a gauze blouse with spaghetti straps despite the cool spring weather -- probably to show off the elaborate tattoo of the caterpillar from _Alice in Wonderland_ that covered her left shoulder -- said to him, "Were you in Desert Storm or something?" Her thin arms were covered with goosebumps, the nipples on her flat chest hard little pebbles under her thin top. He had to resist the impulse to offer her his coat.

"No," he said truthfully. He'd spent most of the war shuttling between Saudi Arabia and D.C. "I wasn't on the ground."

She wrinkled her nose, green eyes bright and clear and young. "I think it's disgusting, all those people who died just so soccer moms can keep driving their SUVs."

_All those people who died afterwards, when Washington didn't keep its promises,_ Paul thought. The girl's friends were giggling in embarrassment. "If you don't like our country's foreign policy you should vote, get involved. Write your representatives in congress."

She goggled at him like he'd grown a second head. "Oh yeah, I'm _sure_," She turned back to her friends, all of them laughing now, and Paul looked away.

He could see a sliver of sky past the awning that covered the dining patio. This morning's high white cloud cover had cleared away, and the ocean-deep blue of the late afternoon sky seemed to stretch upwards forever.

The sight made him feel so cold and sick at heart he had to close his eyes.

When he got back to the table Carter was on the phone, a grim little half-smile on her face as she listened. "Hold on just a moment, Colonel," she said into the cell phone as Paul set her cup down in front of her and sat down again. She held out the phone to him.

"It's Colonel O'Neill," she said. "Apparently we're going to L.A."

* * *

There had been no more seizures or catatonic states. No invisible monsters whispering from the corners of the room, no more rolling around on the floor. Just Daniel doing his job, and if the circumstances were a little peculiar, still, Jack had to admit, it was kinda nice not to worry about hostile natives or marauding Jaffa while Daniel fretted and muttered over his translation. And after all these years, it was still pretty entertaining watching him work. He talked to himself, made faces and tugged at his hair until it stood up in spikes across the top of his head. He kicked off both shoes and pulled his knees up to hook his toes over the edge of the chair. He groaned and rubbed his face with both hands and rocked in his seat like a little kid.

Occasionally he tapped things into his laptop, but more and more frequently as the afternoon wore away he scribbled in his notebook and on yellow legal pads, ripping away pages and letting them drop like autumn leaves to the floor. Indecipherable trails of script sprawled perpendicular to the lines. He went digging through the reference books stuffed in his briefcase, but seemed to find little joy in them since he inevitably grumbled "Idiots," and flung them down again in frustration.

Typical Daniel. Perpetually surprised that the rest of the world hadn't caught up yet.

His number one fan seemed to find cranky, distracted Daniel perfectly charming, though. Wesley brought him fresh cups of coffee which Daniel would accept absently and not get around to drinking until they were stone cold. Then he would take a sip and raise his eyebrows in surprise and set the cup aside, and Wesley would immediately ask, "Can I warm that up for you?" and Daniel would mutter, "No, I'm fine, thank you. Is there any more coffee?" and Wesley would happily rush off to make a fresh pot.

Jack just hoped Daniel didn't get too used to having a groupie at his beck and call, and thought it was his duty to keep him grounded by occasionally saying things like, "C'mon, that's really a take-out menu for the first Sumerian Domino's, isn't it?" or "Wouldn't this be easier if you'd just use the decoder ring already?"

Daniel didn't even bother to snarl, just darting a look at Jack that was both incredulous and infinitely long-suffering before he bent over the tablet again. One foot tapped madly on the floor, one knee bounced, the fingers of his left hand drummed beside the touchpad on his laptop. He hadn't gotten his shirt buttoned up right after Wesley's little ritual this morning, and the collar gaped unevenly at his throat, exposing the sign painted in eyeliner. The one on his forehead was smeared now, making Daniel look like he'd had a run in with an especially enthusiastic priest on Ash Wednesday.

"So do you know what happened to Judge Carter yet?" Jack asked cheerfully after returning from another stroll around the lobby to stretch his legs. Angel had vanished back upstairs, and Cordelia and that other cocky kid, Gunn, were outside in the enclosed courtyard, apparently practicing Cordelia's lines for the show tonight.

He wondered if Gunn were an actor, too. He didn't exactly seem the type, but hell, this was L.A. after all, so who knew? He had only been able to hear the sound of Cordelia's voice through the half-open door, the rhythm of the syllables and not the words themselves, but there had been something faintly familiar about them. He'd been drawing closer, curious despite himself, and thinking again about the way this whole damned building seemed uncomfortably familiar, when Cordelia had burst out loudly enough for Jack to understand each and every word, thank you very much, "For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabel Lee. _God_! Dress rehearsal is tonight and I'm _still_ screwing up my lines!"

He heard Gunn laugh, and then a murmur of something that was probably reassurance, but Jack was already on his way back to check on Daniel, who was fine, and even put down his pen and turned in the chair to say. "Judge Carter? Excuse me?"

Jack shrugged. "You know. You and Wesley both tell me this rock holds the secrets of the universe. If that's true, then it must explain what happened to Judge Carter, am I right?"

Daniel took off his glasses and massaged his forehead with the heel of his hand, further smearing the remains of the eyeliner. "The man's name was _Crater_, Jack. Judge Crater. Are you getting hungry? Having an urge to go out and pick up some lunch?"

"Not a bad idea, now that you mention it."

"It's after four o'clock," Wesley exclaimed. "Good heavens, you must be starving. I'll run out and pick something up. Do you like Thai, Daniel? There's a great place in walking distance."

"I was thinking maybe _Daniel_ and I could go out, get some air and see the sun," Jack said pointedly. "Los Angeles and all. What'dya say, Daniel? Take a quick break and come back at this fresh?"

"Actually, Jack, I was hoping _you_ would go." Daniel hooked his feet behind the top rung of the chair, propped his elbows on his knees, and lowered his head until he could lace his ink-and-eyeliner smudged fingers together at the back of his neck. "The translation's going a lot faster than I have any right to expect. Like something's pushing me along."

"Daniel--" Jack began unhappily.

"I don't want to lose the inspiration or whatever it is by taking a break, because I might not get it back, and this is --" Daniel curled more tightly into himself, groaning as he stretch the muscles in his neck and back, and then abruptly sat up straight. "This is too important. Jack, please. I'm glad you're here but you're driving me crazy, so would you please go away for a little while?"

"Oh, go ahead and tell me what you really want," he snapped back at him, a little stung, but Daniel raised his eyebrows and looked very earnest and Jack felt himself caving like a wet paper bag.

"You say there's a Thai place nearby?" he asked Wesley, mentally daring him, _daring_ him to do so much as smile.

Smart man. He didn't smile. "Indeed there is. Quite a good one, too. Just a block south and then--"

"Either shut up or get out," Daniel pleaded in exasperation, and Jack took Wesley's arm and dragged him out into the lobby. "I don't know why, but for some reason you're bugging Daniel less than I am, so fine, whatever. I'll give Daniel his fifteen minutes, but you swear you'll call me if anything happens? That very second? Here's my cell phone number."

"Of course I'll call, but I don't expect anything to happen. You can see for yourself how stable the spell has been all afternoon."

Jesus, Jack thought. He must be out of his mind to be going along with this. "And most of all, no freaking 'magic' while I'm not here."

"I don't anticipate any need--"

"Just none of that crazy stuff no matter what, we clear on that?"

Wesley squinted in irritation. "We're clear."

"Peachy. Now where's this Thai place again?"

Once Jack was outside in the sun, though, his misgivings faded. He wished he could have convinced Daniel to come along because there was no doubt the fresh air -- ok, the smoggy air, thick with exhaust fumes from the heavy traffic, but it was still less oppressive than the atmosphere inside that creepy old hotel -- would have done Daniel some good. But the truth was, he understood Daniel's refusal, even if he never would have admitted it to Daniel himself. It reminded Jack of the way he'd been back in the days when he was flying missions. So wired and focused on the task at hand that any interruption at all was unendurable. He would stop writing Sara, wouldn't even read the letters she mailed to him because allowing himself to think about home and someone who loved him was the worst distraction of all. And even though Daniel didn't risk getting a Soviet-made Atoll fired up his ass if _his_ concentration wavered, Jack could see where the principle was the same.

Jack was a distraction because Daniel loved him, too.

He was waiting at the first stoplight, hands shoved deep in his pockets, unable to keep from smiling to himself, bouncing on his heels and wondering if he ought to be concerned about having it so damned bad, when a voice behind him called his name.

Jack turned, wiping the silly grin off his face fast. It was Gunn, catching up to him with long, easy strides. "Hey, man," he called cheerfully. "Wes said you were lookin' for food. Mind some company?"

He actually did mind, but Gunn was the least annoying of Angel's strange menagerie, so he only shrugged.

"Cordy's going nuts over this show of hers," Gunn said, taking Jack's noncommittal response for acceptance. "I finally convinced her to go home and get some rest so she doesn't crash and burn before tonight. And this is just the dress reheasal."

"You an actor, too?"

"_Me_?" Gunn cracked a huge grin. "What would make you think that? Can't've been my pretty face."

"It's L.A. I thought everybody wanted to act."

"Not me," Gunn chuckled. "I want to _direct_, man. Hey, how set are you on Thai food, really? 'Cause Jojo's makes the meanest chili dogs this side 'a 175th Street. "

That did sound better than pad thai noodles. "I'm in."

"You won't regret it. Their chili will burn your face off."

"And that's a good thing."

"Damn straight it is. So how about you? Wes says you were Air Force. That for real?"

"It was for real."

"Did you ever fly those big fighter jets? F-14s, F-15s, that kind of thing?"

"I spent a few years doing that. Yeah."

"_Damn._ I used to dream about being a fighter pilot when I was a little kid. I could spend hours having imaginary dogfights with little paper airplanes." Gunn made a swooping gesture with one hand. "That must really be something."

Jack heard the regret in his voice. "How old are you? Nineteen, twenty? It's not too late for you to give it a shot."

Gunn's expression changed and for the first time he looked away, not meeting Jack's eyes. "Naw. That's just the sort of dreams you have when you're a kid and haven't figured out that all the real fights are here on the ground, not up above the clouds somewhere. No offence. Hey, Jojo's is right here."

He steered Jack into an unprepossessing storefront restaurant so narrow there was only a single row of tables ranked hard against the right wall. Even though it was four in the afternoon, every table was full, and the line from the counter in front stretched nearly to the door. The smell of chili and onions made Jack's eyes start to water.

"Told you it was the best," Gunn said. "Don't worry, the line moves fast. So how about your man Jackson? Somehow I get the feelin' he's more or less moving to his own beat, yeah?"

"You wouldn't be wrong about that," Jack admitted.

"That's cool. English is a little off the beaten track himself, but the man took a bullet for me just a coupla months back. If somebody's got somethin' they want to take up with Wes these days, they're gonna have to go through me first, you know what I'm saying?"

In a sudden, vivid flash of memory Jack remembered Daniel's furious cry of protest, the flash of a staff weapon and the stench of burned flesh. The sound of an inert body rolling across the floor.

A bundle of rags. Shaggy hair covering the face of a man Jack had hardly known.

To his surprise, he found himself saying, "Daniel did the same for me once, too."

Gunn looked delighted. "See? See, what'd I tell you? Just because a man spends way too damn much time in a library don't mean you can write him off. He'll blow you away every time, every single fuckin' time. Damn." The line shuffled forward and Gunn went on, still in a high good humor, "Me, I always get Jojo's Hollywood Superstar when I'm here. That's the dog with a fried egg, cheese, chili, onions and jalapenos on top."

"Sounds great," Jack agreed, although twenty minutes later, walking back to the hotel with a plain chilidog for Daniel in a Styrofoam take-out container, he wondered what the hell he'd been thinking, trying to eat like a kid half his age.

"You doin' all right there?" Gunn asked as he let him into the lobby.

"Fine," Jack lied, no idea if his stomach lining would ever recover.

Wesley met them at the door. "Thank goodness you're here --" he started to say, and Jack went from feeling vaguely sick to steely cold with horror.

"Goddammit, you were supposed to _call_," he raged, pushing his way past Wesley to the office. Paper covered the floor. Daniel's books were open and upside down, the pages carelessly creased. Little Egyptian figures marched in lockstep across the screen of his open laptop. Jack whirled. "Where the hell is he?"

"I was trying to tell you," Wesley replied, not losing his temper which somehow made Jack angrier than ever. "He's waiting in the courtyard, right through here."

Now that he looked, Jack saw Daniel's bowed head and the curve of his back through the window. Dammit, dammit all to hell. He stalked off, Wesley saying behind him, "Daniel asked me not to call you," and it took every ounce of self-control Jack possessed for him not to whirl around and bellow back that if Wesley didn't have any better sense than _that_, then Jack supposed he'd taken that bullet for Gunn because he was just too damned stupid to get out of the way.

But because Daniel needed him, Jack let himself into the enclosed courtyard without a word. It was cool out here, shaded from the sun at this time of day, the concrete benches and marble urns seeming to absorb all the warmth from the late afternoon air. Daniel was sitting with his feet on the bench, arms wrapped loosely around his knees.

"Hey, Jack," he eventually said without turning his head.

"Hey yourself." Jack sat down beside him. "Brought you a chilidog."

Daniel finally looked at him, eyes widening a bit. "What part of 'panang curry with tofu' did you not understand?"

"Aw, that's what you always have. I just thought it was time to expand your culinary horizons."

"Thanks." Daniel took the grease-stained brown bag from Jack and peeked inside at the Styrofoam container. "I can always count on you to look out for my best interests."

"You know that's what I'm here for. So. Didja finish translating that big green tablet in there?"

"It'll take me weeks. Months, probably, if I can do it at all."

"Oh." Jack sat back and waited, and when Daniel didn't say anything more he ventured, "I'm guessing the inspiration deal didn't work out so good?"

"It all fell apart almost as soon as you left." Daniel winced. "Like a blast door coming down. Suddenly the logograms were just, God, individual words, no relation to each other all. They could mean anything. And it had all been so clear just a few minutes before."

"I told you that you needed a break," Jack said gently. He really wanted to wipe that ridiculous brown smudge off Daniel's forehead. "Why don't you take a few hours off? We could go down to the beach or something. Get a run in before sunset, come back with a clear head."

"No. There's no time."

"But there is time for you to stare at that piece of rock until your eyes start to bleed? C'mon, Daniel, how much sense does that make?"

"You don't understand. Jack, I've made a huge mistake."

Well, shit.

Daniel didn't say things like that. He was the most arrogant, stubborn son of a bitch Jack had ever known, and even with the entire universe stacked against him Daniel never fucking _ever_ admitted he was wrong.

Except when he really was.

"Mistake?" Jack tried to ask in a calm sort of voice. "What, uh, kind of mistake are we talking about here?"

Daniel closed his eyes and lowered his head, pushing his outstretched fingers though his hair. He talked like the words themselves hurt him. "I thought if I could figure out how the Revenuers defeated the goa'uld, then we could do the same thing."

"Right, that's how you explained it before. Sounded like a good plan to me. Hell, it still sounds like a good plan. That's the whole reason we're here, right?"

"I was an idiot," Daniel said harshly. He raised his head again and stared at Jack with red-rimmed eyes. "I've managed to translate maybe a tenth of the Ishakidu manuscript, and I was right about one thing. It really does explain how the Revenuers almost wiped out all the goa'uld everywhere."

"And that's ... not a good thing?" Jack asked cautiously.

"It took the goa'uld two million years to recover. I think it took mankind even longer."

"No, now wait a minute," Jack protested. "There wasn't even such a thing as _homo sapiens_ that long ago."

"There are stories of cities under the polar icecaps that are more than five million years old."

"Yes, and there are stories that the moon is made of green cheese, too, but that doesn't mean--"

"Jack, I don't know for sure. I can't know for sure. But I think it's at least possible that the same thing that defeated the goa'uld also kicked mankind so far back down the evolutionary scale as a species that it took us a couple of million years to figure out how to use pointed sticks to hunt antelope again."

"Ah. I think I see the problem. So if you're right, then using the Revenuer's anti-goa'uld weapon would probably _not_ be the brightest thing we could possibly do."

Daniel shrugged miserably. "I'm sorry. You know I was hoping--"

"Hey," Jack interrupted him. "No biggie. We've hit dead ends before. So what was the Revenuer's secret weapon after all? Some kind of superduper intergalactic naquada bomb that just blew everybody up?"

"No," Daniel said. "All the Revenuers did was awaken their sleeping god."

Jack felt ice crackling up his spine, freezing the base of his skull. "I don't understand," he muttered angrily because he _did_ understand. They had been within ten klicks of its temple, and simply being on the same planet had nearly driven them all insane. Jack was still having nightmares about Charlie and that non-existent staircase behind the wall in his garage.

"P3X-636. Jesus, Daniel. _Jesus._"

"I know." His voice was barely a whisper

"Did you?" Jack demanded, so angry and bewildered he couldn't sit still any longer. He got up and paced from one side of the small courtyard to the other, aware of Daniel's eyes on him the whole time. "Did you really get Hammond to send us to that place _knowing_ what was waiting for us?"

"We've been dealing with creatures who call themselves gods for years now," Daniel said stubbornly. "Can you blame me for not taking the hype seriously this time?"

"That's not the point," Jack snapped. "Has it occurred to you that you endangered all of us by letting us walk through the stargate without an inkling of what might be on the other side?"

"Two million years, Jack. How could I have expected to find anything but ruins?"

He had a point, but Jack wasn't appeased. "And once you figured out there was something a little more lively among the ruins?"

Daniel seemed to draw into himself. He closed his eyes for a long moment, but Jack could see a nerve twitching in one closed eyelid. "By then it was too late." He opened his eyes again at last and managed to look steadily at Jack with an obvious effort. "I was already too crazy to tell you, remember? Because I really don't, but per your mission report --" a miserable little not-smile twisted the corner of Daniel's mouth, "--I was quite the entertaining head case for about twenty-hour hours there."

Christ, but Jack wanted to smack that expression off Daniel's face. "It was hypoxia. You weren't responsible."

"It wasn't hypoxia."

"So it was that thing under the temple. Daniel, why did it hit you so hard when the rest of us were able to keep functioning? Relatively well, I mean. At least well enough to get back to the gate. Does that mean there's a way to defend ourselves?"

"If there is, it would be something along the lines of don't over-expose yourself to the Light, keep the hell away from the Revenuers and don't study their technology."

"Perform magic, you mean."

"Same difference. And all that's only if the Revenuers' god is still asleep. Obviously once it's awake, all bets are off."

Jack felt a buzz of horror rising up inside him like foam in a glass of beer. "And we woke it up."

"No," Daniel disagreed. "Our presence shouldn't have mattered. I don't think a midsized thermonuclear device would have made much of an difference to a being that vast, that ancient. But someone else is trying to wake it up."

"Aw, hell. The Revenuers?"

"I don't think so. They wouldn't need the instruction manual to awaken their own god, would they? So I think it's whoever got here first. The people who got a copy of the Ishakidu manuscript from Denver months ago."

"How can you possibly know that?" Jack demanded, even though he believed Daniel.

"Because the prophet of the sleeping god is already here. A voice crying in the wilderness saying prepare ye the way of the Lord."

"That's not very fucking funny."

"I'm not trying to be funny. It's happening _now_. We've all seen the prophet without a face, the tattered king. The waking nightmares, the violent sundering of family ties. The straight paths are being made crooked and the smooth places rough."

"If you're right -- and I'm not saying I believe you, but just supposing you are -- this is sheer insanity. Who would do something like this? I thought you said nobody but you could translate that damned tablet in the first place."

I should have said I didn't think there were many people around who could do a very _good_ translation." Daniel snorted without amusement. "I figure it's either occultists like Wesley, people who don't know anything about the goa'uld and who are trying to work this spell as an experiment or a power trip --

"-- or it's a group like the NID who don't care what the consequences are, as long as it's a weapon against the goa'uld," Jack finished the thought for him. "They got a sloppy translation from the first Sumerian scholar they could lay their dirty paws on and ran with it, no idea what they're really dealing with."

"They've probably been following my research all along. Reviewed the mission reports from P3X-636." Pain flashed across Daniel's face. "All this time, I've been thinking I'd found a way for those six months when I was wandering around the country out of my head to actually _help_ us, maybe stop the goa'uld for good, when really I was just blazing a trail for the NID."

"Daniel." Jack finally sat down again next to him and put his hand on his shoulder until Daniel looked at him, hollow-eyed. "Where are they? How do we stop them?"

Daniel took a deep breath and leaned into the pressure of Jack's hand on his shoulder. "I don't know, but I think they're here in Los Angeles. Maybe not too far away from us. It's muffled now because of what Wesley did--" Daniel put his palm over the smudge on his forehead for a moment, "But the visions of a faceless prophet have been much more vivid and disturbing ever since I got here. And I've felt this sort of buzzing in my head and in my gut, and I thought it was just a change in air pressure from Colorado Springs but--"

"Or bein' in love, maybe?" Jack asked recklessly, and Daniel choked.

"Are you -- Do you understand we could be talking about the end of the world?"

"I know," Jack agreed placidly. His head was spinning and he had a painfully upset stomach from the shock of Daniel's news on top of a Jojo's Hollywood Superstar, but they'd been in worse spots than this before, he was pretty sure. "That's why I thought I'd better let you know now."

Daniel pulled Jack's hand off his shoulder and then didn't let go. "You're crazy," he said.

"Maybe. But you kissed me back, so what does that make you?"

Daniel wasn't quite up to smiling yet, but did the best he could.

"So you think you can follow this buzzing in your gut to the NID lair?"

"No. It's not like something directional." He still had his fingers wrapped around Jack's.

"Could Jim Ellison do it?"

Daniel looked startled. "I don't know. Maybe."

"Good enough for me. We'll get him down here."

"But Jack, you do understand that it could already be too late? If they've already completed the ritual then there's probably nothing we can do."

"How will we know?"

"I don't think we will. From everything I've read, I think the awakening of the Revenuers' god will be like falling into an endless nightmare. We'll never even know."

"Well, yeah, not until we snap out of it a coupla million years later and figure out how to whittle pointy sticks again."

"Right. There's always that to look forward to."

Jack put his free hand on the back of Daniel's neck and gently pulled him forward until Daniel's head rested on his shoulder, and he could feel Daniel's warm breath against the side of his throat. "Don't think I'm letting you off the hook for '636," he said gruffly. "But this isn't your fault."

Daniel didn't answer, but he didn't pull away, either.

"When we beat this thing, it's going to be because you were the one who figured out what was going on in the first place. Got that? Or do I have to explain in words of one syllable?"

"I think those _were_ words of one syllable," Daniel mumbled against Jack's neck.

"Smart ass." Jack cuffed the back of his head very gently and when Daniel sat up again, a watery smile on his face, Jack got out his cell phone.

"Carter? O'Neill. Look. I've got a head's up for you."

* * *

He wondered what Jim would think about getting a dog.

Nothing fancy. Just a mutt from the pound, not too big, not too small. One of those smart, eager-to-please dogs who looked up at you with bright, dark eyes, tongue lolling out of its mouth, laughing silently with its jaws wide open as it waited for you to throw the ball again. Those were the kind of dogs that always seemed drawn to Jim when they went to the park.

Actually, although Blair didn't know all that much about dogs he thought the one who kept bringing a soggy, disgusting tennis ball back to Jim this afternoon was probably a purebred of some kind. Her coat was silky chocolate, her chest broad and deep. Noble head, sensitive eyes.

At least until she stretched out her front legs and yapped up at Jim like a puppy when Jim feinted and didn't actually throw the ball for her. Then all that sensitivity and nobility went out the window.

"What?" Jim said to her gravely, casually transferring the tennis ball from hand to hand. "Is there a problem?"

The dog barked again, leaped up and then went down onto her front elbows, tail wagging madly.

"Oh. This? You want me to throw this again?"

"Quit teasing her, man," Blair protested.

"We're establishing a rapport," Jim said, entirely serious. "OK. Go get it, girl."

The dog turned and took off running even before Jim drew his arm back.

"And before you ask, Sandburg, no, we are not getting a dog."

"I didn't say a word."

The chocolate brown purebred something came trotting back with her tail in the air like a flag, the drool-covered tennis ball firmly clenched in her jaws. When she was three feet away from Jim she suddenly turned and trotted in a wide circle just beyond the reach of his hand and triumphantly carried the ball back to her owner, who had been watching tolerantly from a bench on the other side of the walk.

"But I was just thinking it seemed like --"

"No. Neither one of us are home enough to take care of a dog. She'd be locked up in the loft all day. It wouldn't be fair."

"Yeah, yeah, I know."

Unexpectedly, Jim reached out and grasped Blair's hand for a moment, squeezing hard. He smiled as he let go, and Blair grinned back helplessly. "Maybe when things are a little more settled."

"Yeah." Blair had to look away, because moments like these made him feel lighter than air, but also kinda made him want to make him bawl out loud, because it was just so outrageously, ridiculously _nice_. Blair had never been the sort to believe in happily ever after, and he hadn't pegged Jim for the type either, but look at the man. Thursday afternoon in the park, kicking back and talking about settling down. Maybe even getting a dog. Jeez.

Then Jim knocked Blair's arm gently with his elbow. "We've got company," he said, and Blair looked around, his heart sinking. Walking down the hill towards them was a man in a white sweater and cream-colored slacks. In the bright afternoon sunlight, against the sharp, new green of the grass on the hillside, he was practically lambent.

"Damn," Blair said quietly. He stood up. "Look, let me talk to him first, would you?"

"Chief, it's not his fault."

"Except for the sense in which it's pretty much _all_ his fault? Yeah, I can buy that. Come on, I'm not going to create a scene. I just want to hear him say that they really need you to do this. I don't think that's asking too much."

"That's not what you want at all," Jim said gently.

"Maybe not, but I expect it's the best I can hope for. Would you give me some privacy?"

Jim shrugged. "I'll try. It's not so easy to tune out your own name."

"What makes you think we're going to be talking about you, man?" Blair wished he could kiss him, but he only turned and jogged up the hill to meet Daniel Jackson half way.

"Dr. Sandburg," he said formally, when Blair was in range, and held out his hand. "It's good to see you again."

Blair could do formal when required. He shook hands. "You're looking a lot better than the last time I saw you," Blair told him truthfully. When Daniel had finally left the loft in the company of his friends and personal physician and a whole damned contingent of airmen four months ago he had more or less been the same gaunt, frightened man Blair had found on campus on Christmas Eve. Even worse, actually. Unshaven and bruised, with his hand in a cast and an impressive shiner. He had refused a stretcher (not, Blair knew, that they could have gotten one in the elevator anyway) and he had been clinging to Colonel O'Neill's arm like it was the last point of stability in the universe.

The man coming to take Jim away now couldn't have been more different. Confident and easy, glowing with good health. A diplomat's smile on his handsome face. "I never had the chance to thank you for coming to my aid when you did. There's no doubt in my mind that you saved my life, and I'm in your debt."

"Really? OK, I'd like to call in that debt now, please. Leave Jim out of this."

Daniel shrugged with regret. "I'm sorry. You know I can't."

"Explain to me why not."

"I believe this will clarify everything," Daniel said, and handed Blair small book.

He took it gingerly and turned it in his hands with care. It was little more than a pamphlet, the cover brittle with age. The title was written in a language Blair didn't know, and when he let it fall open, he saw on the frontispiece a youthful figure with long, curling hair stooping to extend a hand to a hooded man crouched upon the ground. All that was visible of the crouched man were three puffy, fat fingers protruding from the sleeve of his robe.

Blair went cold all over. "What is this?"

"Just read it. You'll understand."

"Read it? I can't read it. I don't even recognize the language. You're the linguist. You tell me what ..." Blair trailed off. The symbols and squiggles had begun to dance on the page, lines becoming letters, the letters resolving themselves into words. The figures on the frontispiece were moving, too. The crouched figure had lifted both hands, intending to throw back his hood, and the long-haired youth was recoiling, his own hands before his face as if to protect himself from an unendurable vision.

Blair slammed the cover shut. "What _is_ this?"

"You have to read it," Daniel explained slowly, as though Blair were being a little stupid. "Detective Ellison needs you to read it."

Blair backed away from him, allowing the book to drop from his hands. "Not a chance in hell."

A dog began to howl. Blair whirled around, his heart in his throat, and saw the bench where he'd left Jim only a moment before was now empty. The chocolate brown dog threw back her head and howled again.

"You son of a _bitch_! " He turned on Daniel furiously. "Where is he? What did you do with him?"

"We need his help," Daniel explained again, and his lips were moving more slowly than the words. "Jim understands."

* * *

> "The everyday Kaluli world of gardens, rivers, and forests is coextensive with another, invisible side of reality. 'Do you see that tree?' another man asked one day on the path. 'In their world, that is a house. Do you see the birds? To each other, they appear as men.' Similarly, houses in our world appear as exceptionally big trees or river pools to them, and we as animals there."
> 
> Schieffelin: The Sorrow of the Lonely (1976)

* * *

The dog was still howling when Blair opened his eyes.

He shook his head, trying to get his bearings. Nobody was where they were supposed to be and his vision was filled with solid, two-dimensional blocks of color. He didn't want to close his eyes again, irrationally afraid he would find himself back in the park with Jim gone and Daniel Jackson glowing like Moses come down from the mountain, but when he finally gave in and blinked hard a couple of times, the colors around him darkened into depth and distance, and he realized he was looking at the carpeted wall of an airplane cabin.

The howling dog was really the whine of jet engines. They were on their way to Los Angeles in a kind of jet Blair had never seen outside of the movies, one with little tables and chairs arranged like a living room in the sky, and Jim was fine. Jim was right here beside him, head on the back of the couch and snoring a little.

Blair got up gingerly, not wanting to wake him. Everyone else was pretty much out of it too. Sam Carter was sitting cross-legged on a sofa on the other side of aisle, her boots on the floor in front of her and her head tilted onto Teal'c's shoulder. Major Davis was sprawled low in an cushy armchair, his legs stretched out in front of himself and his hands laced together over his belt. He had changed into civilian clothes before the flight, but his chinos and pale blue button-down were both so crisp Blair supposed man traveled with a steam iron in his luggage.

He walked the length of the cabin to stretch his legs and shake off the lingering remnants of his dream. The orange light of the sunset shone through the windows on the right side of the jet. They'd be in Los Angeles in time for a late dinner. Apparently Colonel O'Neill had recommended an Indian place in Santa Monica, near their hotel.

"The rest of us have already eaten," Major Davis had said, an odd expression on his face. "That falafel place on Temple. Have you been there?"

Blair had.

"Little on the greasy side. If I want Greek I usually hit Kyros near campus. At least they fry their falafel in olive oil."

So maybe _that_ explained the expression on Davis's face. Indigestion.

Blair walked back. The light was getting redder, splashed like blood across the side of Davis's face and the front of his white shirt. Blair didn't like what the man did for a living, and he loathed his easy assumption that of _course_ Jim would be able to drop everything and jet on down to L.A. on nothing more than the say-so of Daniel Jackson (no surprise where that dream had come from, was it?) but he wasn't petty enough to begrudge Davis his sleep. He went and pulled the shade down over the window so the light slanting into Davis's eyes wouldn't wake him up.

When he turned back, though, Davis's shirt front was still red, and for the first time Blair noticed the music being piped into the cabin. Instrumental versions of old show tunes, and he wondered insanely if that was in warped deference to his and Jim's supposed musical tastes.

He crossed the cabin with his pulse roaring in his ears, jolted by every footstep on the carpeted floor. "Major Davis," he whispered. "Paul."

He put his hand on Paul's shoulder and shook him gently.

His head lolled to the side, exposing the ragged hole where something had sloppily chewed its way through Major Paul Davis's clean-shaven throat.

Blair stumbled away, swallowing back his scream. It was the snake, he knew it. That monster Teal'c carried in his belly like a child in the womb. He spun around, half expecting to see the thing slithering up behind him. _Do not allow it to enter your mouth or the back of your throat,_ Teal'c had once cautioned him seriously, and OK, Blair was on board with that. Christ, was he on board with that. "Where is it, Teal'c?" he demanded harshly, trembling in rage and horror. "God_damn_ you, where the hell is it?"

Teal'c simply looked back at him, Carter's head still resting on his shoulder, and Blair finally saw the slow seep of red spreading up from Teal'c's belt and dripping down his pants leg to puddle on the floor.

Something broke inside. He fled to Jim, pleading with him to wake up, and his relief when Jim opened his eyes was so vast he stuttered incoherently, "Jim, _Jim_! Oh, God, it's Teal'c, it's the snake. It's torn its way out and Teal'c and Sam and Paul --"

Jim put his hands on Blair's shoulders, steadying, calming without a word. Blair gulped and nodded fast and tried to catch his breath so he could explain.

Then Jim's lips curled, and the expression was so not-Jim Ellison that Blair fell back a step. "Jim?"

Jim opened his mouth and a blind, fleshy knob protruded from between his lips. At the end of it was a vestigial second mouth, this one lined with perfect little white teeth that were as neat and square as a baby's.

The second mouth said, "The king has opened his tattered mantle, you little faggot. There's naught but Christ to cry to now."

When Blair finally woke up he was lying on his back with Jim looking down at him. Beyond Jim was the curved ceiling of the jet's cabin.

"Hey," Jim was saying. "You OK? Your heart rate just went through the roof."

"Fine," Blair croaked. "Just fine." He rolled his head to the side. He was stretched out on one of the little couches, his knees over the arm. Catching forty winks on the way to Los Angeles, and who could blame him for that? Nobody had gotten any sleep last night.

Teal'c was still engrossed in a copy of USA Today and Carter was working on her laptop, as was Major Davis. OK, apparently he was the only sluggard actually trying to sleep. Did they all know something he didn't?

He pushed himself upright, shrugging aside Jim's offer of help, and stumbled to the bathroom at the back of the jet. Nice that it was so much larger than the bathrooms on commercial air liners, because there was plenty of room for him to drop to his knees before vomiting into the toilet. Then he sat down with his back against the door, his arms crossed over his aching gut, and after another minute or two, he started to cry.

Damn.

He tried to hold back the tears, but for all his efforts he just cried harder. He had no illusions about what Jim was hearing either. Blair supposed he could have passed off losing his lunch as motion sickness, but somehow he doubted Jim would buy that as an explanation for huddling on the bathroom floor and sobbing like a baby.

That thought called up the image of little square baby teeth, and his stomach cramped so badly he was afraid he was going to be sick again.

"Chief." Jim was rapping quietly on the bathroom door. "Everything all right in there?"

"Be out in a minute," Blair said.

A moment of silence, then he heard Jim trying the knob.

"I said I'd be out a minute," Blair repeated. He grabbed a wad of toilet paper, wiped his eyes and blew his nose. "Little air sick."

"Uh huh. Do me a favor and open the door, would you Sandburg?"

Blair considered insisting on his privacy, but in the end he reached up behind his head and released the lock, then scooted forward enough for Jim to ease the door open behind him. He stepped in and let it shut again.

"The chairs are probably more comfortable than the bathroom floor," Jim said mildly.

"Yep," Blair agreed. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve. "I asked you to give me a minute, man."

"I heard." Jim lowered himself to the floor next to Blair. There wasn't room for him to stretch out his legs, but he settled back against the door and put his arm around Blair's shoulders like he was prepared to sit there for the rest of the flight all the same. "You OK?"

"Uh, not really." Blair almost laughed, but it turned into another sob. Jim tightened his arm around his shoulders and rubbed his hand up and down Blair's upper arm while Blair closed his eyes and tried to pull himself together.

"It's all right," Jim murmured to him, his voice little more than a whisper in Blair's ear. "We're both all right."

Blair gave a shaky laugh. "And those guys out there must think I'm nuts."

"Both of us, actually." Jim tilted his head. "Well, yeah, OK, Major Davis is worried you'll talk me out of helping on this mission."

"Don't they get what _sentinel_ means at all?" Blair snorted.

"Teal'c reminded him that I can hear everything he's saying."

"Did you know he read my dissertation?"

Jim patted his shoulder. "I heard."

"Speaking of sentinels," Blair said. "Right. Look, I'm sorry. It was a bad dream."

"You OK now?"

"Sure. Interrupted sleep patterns, all this military shit, it's no wonder, right?"

"What'd you dream about?"

The tears welled up again, even though Blair clinched his fists as hard as he could, trying to will them away.

"Hey." Jim put his hand on the side of Blair's face and pulled him closer. He kissed Blair's temple and Blair dropped his head.

"Don't."

For a moment Jim went still. Then he got up, staggering a little in the close quarters, and pulled Blair up with him. When he had Blair on his feet again, he tugged him close and put his arms around him, holding him until Blair finally whispered, "I don't know if I can do this. I just I don't know if I can."

"You don't have to. We'll turn the plane around and go back to Cascade if that's what you need."

Blair hiccupped. "And you'll come with me?"

"I'm sorry." He stroked the back of Blair's head. "You know I can't."

"I don't know how to protect you," Blair whispered, his throat scoured, his eyes burning. "I don't know how to take care of you. Not against something like this."

Jim held on tight, and Blair kept his face tucked against Jim's throat. He supposed he was being selfish, and could only imagine how Jim must feel about this, having to stand here and cuddle his hysterical partner behind a bathroom door with Air Force officers on the other side. Bad enough how Blair himself was feeling right now, but a rather mortified sense of manhood hardly mattered, compared to what he'd seen in those nightmares.

Compared to what he _hadn't_ seen.

"You're going to have to be so careful, man," he finally tried to explain to Jim. "Whatever it is they want you to look for when we get to L.A., we've got to make sure you don't zone."

"OK. We'll be careful," Jim agreed easily.

Oh, right. Mr. Cautious being Jim's middle name and all. Blair straightened up and grabbed a handful of tissues from the dispenser above the sink to wipe his face. "More than that," he insisted. "Even a relaxed meditative state could be dangerous, and not being able to meditate will just stress you out more, and make it more likely that you _will_ zone."

Jim smiled at him gently. "You know, Sandburg, I used to manage pretty well on my own. Back in the days before I even knew what a mantra was."

"Nostalgic?" It was pretty feeble, but Jim's smile widened.

"Well, I wasn't going to put it quite like that."

"I knew it," Blair laid his fingers over Jim's mouth for a moment. "When's the last time you saw the panther, man?"

Jim drew back at once, the good humor he'd affected for Blair's sake vanishing like smoke.

"Months," he said tightly. "I don't even remember."

Personally, Blair was sure Jim did remember, and he wished vaguely that things were different so they could talk about it, but right now it just didn't matter. Not when they'd be in Los Angeles within the hour.

"The point is, I don't think you could see your spirit animal now even if you went looking for it."

"Hey." Jim was obviously still worried about Blair, which seemed to be the main reason he kept his temper rigidly under control. He wasn't smiling though. "I don't go looking for -- " he wanted to say "hallucinations," Blair was pretty certain. "Visions. I don't go looking for visions. They find me, and usually just about the time when my life is falling apart. If I'm not being, uh, haunted right now, then as far as I'm concerned that's a good thing. You about ready to get out of the bathroom, Chief?"

"Not yet." Blair moved around to plant himself in front of Jim, his back to the door. "You know my dreams have been ... different. Ever since the fountain."

Jim flinched. "Jim?" Blair felt badly, but he wouldn't push like this if it weren't so damned important.

"You've told me."

"Yeah, well -- " Blair tried to find the words to talk about his dreams, and found he couldn't really discuss them much better than Jim could. To explain that even during the most mundane reworkings of the waking world -- academic squabbles, bureaucratic wrangling with the PD, good times and not so good times and too much of the detritus of nearly five years on the streets with Jim -- no matter what he dreamed since he had drowned in the fountain, he always remained aware of what lay beyond.

The Greenlands. The upside-down world. The dreaming time.

"It's gone," Blair said.

"What's gone?"

"The other side." Blair was trying as hard as he could to be calm, but it still came out as a moan of grief and loss as he thought about the howling brown dog and snap of white baby teeth.

"It's empty. Dead, gone, I don't know -- aw, fuck, man--" He crammed the side of his hand into his mouth to keep himself from wailing out loud. Enough crying, _enough_.

"Chief." Jim reached for him and Blair backed away again, shaking his head violently. He had to say it out loud first. He took his hand out of his mouth when he was sure he wouldn't start to shriek.

"There's no spirit world anymore. There's nothing on the other side of being awake but something so huge and so, so _meaningless_ \--"

Jim was watching him, eyes wide with sympathy, misting at Blair's pain.

"You already knew," Blair suddenly realized. "That's what you've been telling me all along, ever since the house on Tacoma Heights. God, Jim," he knotted his fists in Jim's shirt and butted his forehead against Jim's chest, frantic with impatience at his own blindness. "How do you deal? How are you keeping it together?"

Jim put his arms around him and pulled him in close until Blair had to embrace him as well. "Not all that great, actually," he muttered. Blair was still trembling with shock and reaction, but he flattened himself against Jim, drawing his breath in time with Jim's, feeling the heavy beat of Jim's heart laboring in his breast. "Guess it's a good thing I've got you."


	6. Chapter 6

> Now there was there nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine feeding. And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them. And forthwith Jesus gave them leave.
> 
> Mark 11-13

* * *

Trying to work on the Ishakidu manuscript with Jack in the room was like trying to conjugate irregular Dardic verbs while a large, angry hornet buzzed around his head.

OK, it was more like trying to work with a hornet perched on the corner of his desk, said hornet trying really, _really_ hard not to be large or angry.

"Jack --" he started to say for the third or forth or maybe it was the twentieth time.

"No, Daniel."

"You don't even know what --"

"I'm not leaving. Deal with it."

Daniel scowled in exasperation, and Jack smiled back sweetly. Not bad for a man who was completely freaked out.

Daniel could hardly blame him for that. He was pretty much completely freaked out himself, though he was trying really hard not to think about it. There was obviously no use wondering if mankind's time was already up, if they were already trapped in a nightmare from which none of them would ever awaken.

One good thing. If mankind were history, then so were the goa'uld. Them, and pretty much every other sentient species in the galaxy.

It was quite a thought. All culture, all knowledge, every fragment of beauty that every race anywhere had ever preserved from the fire of existence, lost forever.

Yeah, it was something to think about, all right. Especially if you wanted to go utterly insane. Cuneiform danced across the delicate green alabaster, and Daniel threw his pen across the room as hard as he could, and then immediately regretted it.

"All right," Jack said calmly. "That's it for tonight."

"I can't stop." Daniel played at being just as calm, with rather less success, he knew. "There isn't time."

"And just how much progress have you made in the last three hours?"

Since the honest answer to that would be "none," Daniel said, "I'm certainly not going to make any while I'm sleeping back at the hotel."

Wesley stuck his head in the door. "Everything all right? Do you need anything?"

What Daniel needed was for Jack and Wesley to sit down and talk about which local occultists might have the resources and sheer recklessness to have translated the Ishakidu manuscript, because it was abundantly clear to Daniel this was exactly the sort of thing that the SGC knew absolutely nothing about, whereas Wesley and friends probably knew quite a lot.

Jack, however, was immovable. Daniel wasn't to say a word about the implications of his translation to the employees and hanger-ons or whatever the hell they were of Angel Investigations.

"We're fine, thanks," Jack told Wesley without hesitation. "In fact, Dr. Jackson here is ready to call it a night."

"Jack, I really think --"

"OK with you if we show up in the morning around eight? Get an early start?

Wesley glanced from Daniel to Jack. "Yes -- yes, I suppose, of course. Whatever you like."

"Good man." Jack clapped him on the shoulder. "You've been a big help today, and we'll see you in the morning. Daniel, wanna pack it up?"

Daniel was still trying to decide whether he wanted to argue the point -- right, he was exhausted and distracted and making no progress at all on the translation, but on the other hand, considering what was at stake here how could he possibly break for the night? -- when Jack's cellphone began to ring.

"O'Neill." He looked at Daniel and Wesley. "Glad to hear it. See you in half an hour, forty-five minutes, depending on traffic."

"You have friends in town." Wesley said flatly as Jack put the phone away. "Will they be here in the morning as well?"

"It's possible. You don't have a problem with that, do you?"

Wesley looked to Daniel. Obviously he did have a problem.

"We wouldn't ask if this weren't so important," Daniel said.

"Do you know yet if the manuscript actually relates to the appearance of the tattered king? The apparent slippage of dimensions we all observed last night?"

Daniel couldn't lie to the man so he held his tongue, unhappily, and let Jack do it. "Dr. Jackson doesn't know anything for certain. Archaic Sumerian is an extremely difficult language, you know."

Wesley didn't answer out loud, but what he would have _liked_ to say was written clear on his face.

* * *

"Jack, we need to trust these people. You're making a mistake by keeping them in the dark."

The Los Angeles skyline was fading from gaudy orange to ashen gray, the moon rising pallid behind the streetlights.

"Do you think it would be faster to drop down to La Cienega, or just take Sunset all the way out?"

"I don't know. Sunset, probably. But I'm serious about this. Depending on Jim Ellison to -- well, I don't know, _sense_ \-- the people responsible for this when we could just _ask_ Wesley --"

"Sunset it is," Jack said, turning left onto Highland. "Look, Daniel, has it occurred to you that the entire weird menagerie calling itself 'Angel Investigations' could be responsible for what's happening themselves?"

"You don't really believe that."

"I don't know whether I believe anything right now, but these are the people who have had physical possession of that green rock for the past six months. Wyndam-Price is naive at best, Gunn and Chase are children, and trust me, there's something seriously up with that Angel character."

"You're just unhappy with the idea of a grown man calling himself 'Angel.'" Daniel scrubbed at his forehead, wishing he had remembered to wash off the eyeliner before leaving. He imagined he could feel the weight of the signs on his skin itching like old scars.

"Well, I'm not happy with -- _Jesus_!"

Daniel felt it too, a stomach drop sense of vertigo like using a ring transporter or topping the hill of a rollercoaster.

"What the hell was that?" Jack exclaimed furiously. He never lost control of the car, but most of the drivers around them didn't have Jack's reflexes. Daniel heard brakes squealing behind them and the sickening crump of metal. A driver in front swerved into oncoming traffic and was struck so hard her car spun in a full circle and ended up on its side halfway off the curb, wheels spinning madly. Car alarms began to wail all around them, and somewhere nearby a man was screaming in rage or pain.

Jack got very calm and very quiet as he tried to maneuver out of traffic, but both sides of the street were parked bumper to bumper and there was nowhere to go. Then Daniel saw what was coming towards them.

"Oh, my God."

"It's not real," Jack said tightly. "There's no fucking way that could be real."

There were pigs in the road. Massive, bloated beasts, each so tremendous it could hardly support its own body weight, lumbering on hooves that smacked the pavement with a flat, ringing sound. Their heads were malformed, but it wasn't until the impossible herd drew closer Daniel could tell how.

The pigs had human faces.

Jack made a choked sound of disgust and gunned the engine.

Daniel flung out his arm, shouting "Jack, _no_!" but he was already too late. The faces seemed to leap forward, cramming themselves against the windshield. The impact smashed Daniel forward into the violently expanding airbag and then sideways against the car door. Something red blotted out everything except Daniel's realization that the nightmare was already here. He couldn't see Jack and he couldn't hear him. There was only the red universe and messy, breath-stealing jolts of pain. He tried to call Jack, but couldn't hear his own voice over the squeal of his nerve endings.

Then something snapped sharply though Daniel's fog. Someone had opened the car door and released his seatbelt.

Daniel couldn't see his rescuer, but the reminder of blessedly ordinary things like car doors and seat belts cleared some of his shock, and this time when he turned his head he could finally see Jack. The airbag had pinned him against the seatback, and his head was turned towards Daniel, eyes blinking open.

"Hey," Jack whispered hoarsely. He took a deep breath, shuddering. "You hurt?"

"No," Daniel lied ridiculously. Then he said, "Yeah. Think maybe --" Talking was an effort. He searched for individual words as though they were copper coins resting on the bottom of a shallow, muddy pond. "I don't know. Maybe dislocated my shoulder."

The lines around Jack's eyes deepened as he winced. "Fuck, Danny. That'll hurt like a sonuvabitch."

"Yeah." His voice rose out of his control, and he was pretty sure he must be going into shock. "Actually, it does." He swallowed back either tears or laughter. "How bad are you--"

And suddenly Daniel found himself being dragged out of the rental car. His shoulder hit the side of the door, and the sludgy red pain flared up like a wildfire. He dropped to his knees, his right arm hanging uselessly at his side, hearing Jack shout after him.

"Jack's hurt," Daniel pleaded. "Please get him out. There were pigs in the road."

"Things are getting pretty goddamned strange," agreed someone who was standing above him. Maybe one of the same people who then proceeded to grab him under both arms and haul him to his feet.

Daniel couldn't breathe through the pain.

"As a matter of fact, Dr. Jackson, that's really what we wanted to talk to you about."

* * *

> When I, the goddess, was walking around in heaven, walking around on earth, when I, Inana, was walking around in heaven, walking around on earth, when I was walking around in Elam and Subir, when I was walking around in the Lulubi mountains, when I turned towards the centre of the mountains, as I, the goddess, approached the mountain it showed me no respect, as I, Inana, approached the mountain it showed me no respect, as I approached the mountain range of Ebih it showed me no respect.
> 
> Since they showed me no respect, since they did not put their noses to the ground for me, since they did not rub their lips in the dust for me, I shall fill the soaring mountain range with my terror.
> 
> Inana and Ebih

* * *

"They're coming back tomorrow," Angel repeated flatly. "With reinforcements."

"Friends," Wesley corrected, but his heart wasn't really in it. "Jack said they were friends."

"Right. Wesley, I don't trust O'Neill and Jackson as it is. I certainly don't trust any of their so-called friends sight unseen."

"Oh, I don't know," Gunn shrugged. "Jack seems OK."

"Let me ask you something. So Dr. Jackson is this brilliant linguist. In fact, you told me this morning that if anyone could translate the Ishakidu manuscript, he was our man. So how many hours did he spend on it today? Ten? More?"

"Something like that," Wesley agreed unhappily.

"And how much more do we know about this green rock than when he started this morning?"

Wesley's lips tightened. "I think Daniel may have made quite a bit of progress on his translation, but, ah, Jack wouldn't allow him to tell me anything substantial."

"I don't like this at all. Do you know what's happening at Caritas right now?"

"You've been to Caritas?"

"And he didn't invite us," Gunn said. "That's cold, man."

"The Host is gone."

"Gone?" Wesley asked, startled. "For good?"

"He left right after last night's psychic mess. Patrons at Caritas saw the tattered man without a face just like we did, and as soon as it was over and while people were still picking themselves off the floor, the Host announced that the door had shut for good."

"The door?" Gunn said. "What door?"

"Exactly what you think. No more soul-readings. No more showing people their path. Like his access to the Higher Powers just -- ended."

"Oh, my God." Wesley found his way to one of the lobby sofas and sat down heavily. "Cordelia."

Angel crossed his arms over his chest. "Exactly. She hasn't had a vision in weeks either."

"So this has been building all along." Wesley looked shaken to the core. "Right under our very noses, and none of us even noticed."

"Under the circumstances, I don't think I'm willing to allow Jackson and O'Neill any further access to the manuscript until they agree to produce some answers."

"Yes, that's probably ..." Wesley trailed off distractedly. "I just don't understand. What in the name of heaven could have such a profound impact on the higher planes? Magicks on that level would threaten the very foundations of our own reality."

"Hey, hey, hey," Gunn interrupted. "All we've really got going on here is a karaoke bar closing down and the fact that Cordy has been kinda light in the visions department lately. Seems like pretty flimsy evidence to be predicting the end of the world."

The world answered Gunn by taking a hard turn to the left.

Angel felt it in the soles of the feet and in the vulnerable chambers of his heart. He felt it between his temples where unfathomably ancient demon magic had kept neurons firing for centuries after every axon and dendrite should have turned to dust.

This was older still.

Wesley's eyes had gone blank with a kind of stupefied horror. He stumbled to his feet as Gunn swore and backed away, and Angel wondered if they saw what he did, the walls of the Hyperion shimmering and translucent and beyond them nothing at all, not even the sun, not even stars. He put his hands over his face, but his fingers hid nothing, and when he dropped his hands he was alone in a neglected garden.

Weeds grew rank on both sides of the broken stone path. The roses were as thick as brambles, their sparse flowers rotten and half-devoured by worms. Oily black water lay motionless in a cracked cistern, and the marble nymph who presided over the fountain was faceless and armless.

A bubble broke the surface of the water as Angel passed by, releasing the foul smell of decay.

Around a turn in the path, past a sad thicket of hawthorn and laurel, Angel came upon a man sitting in a plain wooden chair. His back was to Angel, his head down, and he didn't respond when Angel called to him.

Angel hesitated then for a long moment, but the loneliness of the garden ultimately propelled him forward. A mist clung to the ground, obscuring his view, and he was very close before he realized the stranger was bound, hands tied to the back of the chair with thin, coarse rope.

His fingers had been twisted into broken claws. The cuffs of his shirt were soaked black with blood.

Branches rustled in the undergrowth, and something burst outwards in a rush of wings and disappeared into the mists.

"Giles," Angel said, because he recognized the tortured man now. Shame twisted in his gut like curdled blood, but this was such an old pain he all but welcomed it in this strange landscape. At least it was something familiar. "You're safe now. I'll take you home."

He put his hand on the man's shoulder before realizing this wasn't Giles at all. Surprised and vaguely angry at having the one recognizable element in this nightmare snatched away from him, he yanked down the blindfold hiding the stranger's face and found Dr. Jackson blinking up at him.

"Where are we?" Angel demanded. "What's happening?"

Wesley's prize linguist blinked again, vague and unfocused. "I don't know," he said. "Help me."

Angel leaned in close. "_Help_ you? You come in here with no idea what you're doing, you fuck up reality and now you want me to help you?" The anger felt good, untangling the tendrils of fear that had begun to wind their way up his spine. Angel had already spent one eternity in hell, and this dark garden reminded him all too vividly of its outlying regions.

He wrapped his hand around Dr. Jackson's broken fingers and savored the way the bound man tensed. "You tell me what's going on, and maybe I'll kill you quickly," Angel promised. Then he put his mouth over Daniel Jackson's as he tightened his grip, and drank the man's screams like blood.

When Angel raised his head he was in the lobby of the Hyperion. Sirens were shrieking in the street and the chandeliers overhead were dark. Gunn was watching him with a face as neutral as he could manage, but Wesley had turned away.

"Jackson --?" Angel muttered at last.

"He's not here, man," Gunn said. "It wasn't real."

"You saw," Angel said in a dull voice. "And you still think I'm no danger to anyone." He curled one hand into a fist, remembering the feel of broken bones grinding together and the heady, sour taste of terror and pain. "How many warnings do you think we're going to get before it _is_ real?"

"Dammit, Angel!" Wesley whirled around. "We have no time for your brooding self-pity right now. Do you hear what's going on outside? The ordinary world just came apart at the seams, and I don't know how well it got put back together again. We've got to find out what's happening, and we have to keep it from happening again, do you understand me?"

Angel shook his head, although he did understand. "Where's Cordelia?"

"She should be at that damned dress rehearsal." Wesley pulled out his cellphone and tried to dial. "Nothing."

Gunn picked up the phone at the front desk. "Regular phone lines are down, too."

"Then we'll drive," Angel said decisively, even though he could still smell the stagnant water in the cistern, still hear wings beating in the underbrush. "You have an address?"

"It should be on the tickets," Wesley said. "Angel, I'm sure she gave them to you."

"That was weeks ago," Angel protested, sorting hurriedly through the mail stacked on the reception desk.

Gunn whistled through his teeth. "You lost Cordy's tickets? Whoo, man, maybe you better hope the world ends after all."

Angel didn't bother to respond, yanking open file drawers and pulling out folders as though he really expected to find one labeled "Cordelia's show tickets." It was more unreal than the ruined garden, trying to find theatre tickets while sirens screamed on the streets outside. The light was failing as dusk gave way to night; before long it would be too dark for Wesley and Gunn to see anything in here.

"Have we got flashlights?" he asked, pulling open the bottom file drawer. "You two better find them while you can still see."

"Already on it," Gunn announced, and a light stabbed through the shadowy recesses of the lobby.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute." Wesley spread a newspaper out on the desk. "I've got it. It should be in the _Weekly's_ opening shows, right? Here it is." Gunn shone the flashlight over Wesley's shoulder. "The Inana Theatre Group. Corner of Santa Monica and Robertson."

"I hope she has the good sense to stay put until we get there," Angel growled. Blue police lights were crawling up the walls of the dark lobby.

"The Inana Theatre," Wesley repeated thoughtfully.

"I know that name," Angel said.

"You should. A major Sumerian deity, goddess of the morning and evening star... Not a surprising name for an avant-gard theatre group, I suppose. Just an interesting coincidence after Dr. Jackson spent the whole day here trying to translate a Sumerian text, isn't it?"

"What are you suggesting?"

"Nothing. I honestly don't know. If we had more time --"

The front doors slammed open. "We don't have time. They've taken Daniel."

"Jack?" Gunn half-ran to the front doors, catching Jack O'Neill when he staggered and helping him in over the threshold. "Come in. It's all right."

"It's not all right," Jack protested, but he allowed Gunn to help him to a chair and fell into it heavily, the palm of one hand pressed hard against his forehead.

"You're hurt," Wesley said.

"It's a madhouse out there." Jack tried to get to his feet but collapsed again with a groan. "They grabbed Daniel right in front of me."

"Who grabbed him?" Gunn asked. Jack turned his head slowly

"_Who do you think?_"

The words came out as a hiss, and Angel felt the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. Jack's face shifted in the shadows. Blue light from a cop car passing on the street glinted on his canines, one point lying on Jack's lower lip and glistening with spit.

Angel lunged forward, knowing it was impossible and wrong. There hadn't been nearly enough time for the transformation, the dark resurrection. Gunn must have known it was impossible too, but he acted on sheer instinct. In less than the space of a breath he pulled a stake from his coat and plunged it into Jack's chest.

Angel grabbed Gunn's shoulder and flung him violently away, but he'd already heard the wet implosion as wood pierced the walls of Jack's heart. The reek of blood dazzled him as it spilled into Jack's chest cavity.

Jack blinked in surprise. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then died.

"No." Gunn staggered, fumbling with the flashlight and then shining it on the dead man on the sofa. Jack's eyes still looked surprised. "No," he said again. "I saw the face, his motherfucking _teeth_ for chrissakes --"

"You were wrong," Wesley said, his voice flat as he tried to contain his emotion. Gunn stumbled back and then his legs simply folded up under him.

Then Angel felt reality bump like a reel change at the movies. Colors shifted slightly, the blues becoming darker, the red from an ambulance's siren flashing more sharply across the windows. Sounds became more nuanced, and Jack O'Neill no longer lay dead on their sofa. Apparently he'd never been there at all.

Gunn breathed, "Oh, fuck, man," and buried his head in his hands. He made no move to get up from the floor.

"I don't think," Wesley started to say, but his voice wavered beyond the limits of control. He swallowed hard and tried again. "I don't know how much more of this I can take."

"You were the one who told me we didn't have time for self pity," Angel said, not harshly. "We have to get to Cordelia. I think we also have to find Jackson and O'Neill."

Wesley looked at him, face drawn in the shadows. "Yes, of course," he said eventually. "Gunn, there's a chance Cordelia may try to make her way back here. The same with Daniel and Jack. Will you be all right waiting here while Angel and I go out looking for them?"

Gunn raised his head. "How should I know? Would one of you please tell me how in the name of Jesus I'm supposed to know what's real? I just fucking killed a man."

"I don't know," Wesley said. "I can feel it when it starts, and there's some kind of -- I don't know how to describe it. A kind of shuddery feeling inside when it's all over. But when it's actually happening I don't know. It all feels real, and I can't control my reactions."

"No shit," Gunn said.

"We have to go," Angel repeated.

"Yeah. Go. I'll be all right. Probably kill anyone stupid enough to stick their head in the door, but hey, I'll be OK."

"Charles," Wesley said, and put his hand on Gunn's shoulder.

Gunn shook himself free. "Get the hell out of here and find Cordy."

* * *

As it turned out, though, they found O'Neill first, pinned behind the steering wheel of a wrecked Ford Taurus barely five blocks away. Wesley recognized the rental car, and Angel recognized the smell of his blood.

Whatever was happening when reality skipped at beat, Angel was sure it was far closer to prophecy than hallucination, regardless of what Wesley wanted to believe.

"They grabbed Daniel," O'Neill said as soon as Angel wrenched the car door open. "You've got to get in touch with Major Samantha Carter. She should be at the Sands Hotel in Santa Monica."

"Just a moment," Wesley interrupted him, shooting a look at Angel. "Let's get you out of here first. Are you hurt?"

"What do you think? I'm just sitting here for my goddammed health while a bunch of goons drag Daniel --" A police helicopter drowned out the rest of O'Neill's furious snarl. There were no streetlights, and the streets were bumper to bumper with frightened, angry drivers.

Angel nodded to Wesley, not bothering to yell over the roar of the helicopter, and together they tried to lift O'Neill out from behind the wheel. As soon as they started pulling, O'Neill's head went back and a noisy sob of pain escaped him. "Son of a bitch --"

Wesley knelt and reached his hand up under the steering wheel. "His ankle's trapped," he shouted up to Angel. "See if you can get him out."

"There's no time for this," Jack panted. The helicopter was moving away overhead. "Call Major Carter. My cellphone's broken but you --"

"Nobody's phones are working," Wesley told him. "I'm sorry." He changed places with Angel, who felt around the broken floorboards and crumpled dash until he found the cage of smashed plastic and vinyl like teeth around O'Neill's right ankle. His sock was sticky with blood.

"Got it," Angel muttered, bending away the shards. "OK, Wesley, see if you can get him out now," he said, and tried to protect the damaged flesh around his ankle with his hands as Wesley pulled O'Neill out. He was still feeling a disorienting shimmer of deja vu, as though helping O'Neill now made up for not being fast enough to save him ten minutes ago. He got up as soon as O'Neill was free and helped Wesley lower him to the sidewalk, his back against the flat front tire of the rental car.

O'Neill was alternately swearing and hissing in pain through clenched teeth. "No phones?" he finally managed to grit out.

Wesley shook his head. "What happened to Dr. Jackson?"

"I didn't see it," Jack burst out furiously. "Just heard him. He was shouting for me -- goddammit. We have to get to Carter. Do you have a car?"

Wesley looked back at Angel. "We do, but Jack, before we go anywhere I think Angel and I both need to know if the things that are happening now are related to Dr. Jackson's translation of the Ishakidu MS."

O'Neill glared at both of them, dark eyes flashing with the reflection of passing headlights. "How bad's the ankle?" he demanded instead of answering Wesley's question.

"I can't tell in this light," Wesley said. "How does it feel?"

"Like it's smashed to hell and gone." Jack rested the back of head against the side of the car and closed his eyes for a long moment. "Just like this whole planet's gonna be if you people don't help me find Daniel Jackson."

* * *

> The šumunda grass is a fire carrier, he cannot be tied into bundles, the grass cannot be shifted, the grass cannot be loosened, the grass cannot be loosened. ... Having kindled a fire, he spreads it wide. The šumunda grass's habitat is among his bitter waters. He butts about saying: "I will start, I will start a fire".
> 
> _The šumunda grass_, late 3rd millennium to the early 2nd millennium, BCE

* * *

They'd dutifully gone to the Indian restaurant Colonel O'Neill recommended, but Teal'c and Jim Ellison were the only ones with any real appetite. Blair Sandburg still looked like hell, pushing the _dal_ he'd ordered around in his bowl with the back of his spoon and insisting, every time he caught Jim watching him with worried eyes, that he was fine and the food was great.

Major Davis was still looking pretty green from the flight as well. At least in his case, Sam was willing to admit he might actually be airsick, especially after that greasy falafel plate in Cascade. He was nursing a pale ale and unobtrusively checking his watch, probably wondering if they should head back to the hotel to meet Jack.

He checked his watch again, looked at Jim and Blair, then across the table at Teal'c who was scooping up his curried potatoes with the rest of the naan, and then he noticed that Sam was watching him. Davis shrugged slightly, not quite smiling, a diplomatic apology for being a little fidgety, Sam supposed, and reached for the beer he wasn't really drinking.

Then he stopped. He stared at his glass for a moment, then up at Sam. "Major," he said. "Do you--?"

The liquid in the glass was moving, sloshing very gently to and fro.

Earthquake. This was L.A., after all.

Except Sam knew something deeper than the earth was shuddering around them. She tried to shout a warning, but Blair cried out Jim's name in anguish, and everything was already over and done with. The lone and level sands of P3X-636 stretched as far as the sluggish gray ocean. The terrible ruins rose on the other side, incomprehensibly vast. Sam took one step and went crashing to her knees.

Colonel O'Neill had been right all along. The vertigo wasn't caused by the scale of this place or the thin atmosphere. They couldn't find their balance because something old as the universe had slept here for millennia.

Oh, Daniel, she thought, trying again to get to her feet and instead falling heavily to her side as the sky spun around her. _What have you done_?

* * *

"Please," Daniel repeated, keeping his voice very calm and level and his breathing shallow and controlled. "Just let me go back long enough to make sure Jack's all right. Then I'll do whatever you want, but I have to know Jack's OK first."

The men sitting on either side of Daniel didn't even look at him. They were big guys in tailored suits, receivers in their ears and shoulder holsters under their coats.

Daniel tried again. "Look, whatever you want from me, you're not going to get it until I know Jack's all right. He could be bleeding. He could have internal injuries, and as crazy as everything is out there right now, it might be hours before anyone stops to help."

Nothing.

The big sedan was inching its way through the chaotic streets at a snail's pace. Daniel thought they were traveling roughly eastward, but when these well-dressed goons had first dragged him into the car, his shoulder had been hurting so badly he hadn't been able to keep track of direction.

Dusk had given way to night, and the only light came from car headlights. Apparently no giant pigs had made a reappearance, though at this point, he didn't know if that was necessarily a good thing or not.

Daniel's hands were secured in front of himself with plastic restraints, and the pain in his shoulder had spread all the way down his ribcage and across his back. When he thought about it too much his chest began to seize up, so he was panting shallowly and trying to stay very calm. He told himself irritably that nobody had ever suffocated to death from a dislocated shoulder. Still not being able to draw a deep breath frightened him in a way that just wasn't susceptible to rational thought.

"I don't care who you are, you don't have any right to do this," he declared. Shallow breaths, one after another. "You can't hold me against my will. In fact, I'm going back to make sure Jack's all right, and I'm doing it right now."

He might as well have been a fly crawling along the seat for the reaction that garnered from the big guys on either side.

Fine. Enough of this.

They couldn't have been traveling at more than ten miles an hour. Car horns were blatting from all directions, and an ambulance or a police car had been trapped in traffic along with them for the past five minutes, its siren wailing futilely. Hoping it was the police and that they happened to be looking in this direction, Daniel suddenly lunged across the guy on his right, reaching desperately for the door handle.

The sudden movement made his shoulder feel like it was exploding, but the handle began to yield under his fingers, and that was all that mattered. _Jack,_ he thought like a prayer before a fist knotted in the back of his shirt collar and dragged him back.

Daniel twisted, trying to fight, but the big guy on his left simply punched him in the side with one quick, economical blow, and the guy on his right put the heel of his beefy, manicured hand against Daniel's dislocated shoulder and gently pushed a little.

Daniel stopped fighting. He would have screamed, but his lungs didn't work anymore. Apparently nothing worked. He doubled over, the entire world reduced to a smear of carmine red.

"Agent Stophel was a friend of mine," exploded a harsh whisper against his ear. "So go ahead, try something like that again."

Unable to speak or move, tears wet on his cheeks and his heart thudding against his ribcage like a sledgehammer, Daniel wondered who the hell Agent Stophel had been.

* * *

It took Wesley a few moments to understand. He thought it was final dregs of sunset until he realized he was looking southwards. He smelled ash in the wind at the same time.

"Oh my God," he said. "Those are fires."

"Looks like that's probably around Crenshaw, maybe a little further east." Angel shook his head. "They're still trying to get rebuilt from the last time."

"Christ," Jack muttered from the back seat. "This is insane."

Wesley could hardly disagree, but he ventured, "They might not have been set deliberately. A broken gas main or just accidental fires, and with resources stretched so thin the fire department can't get out there."

"Or people think it's the end of the world, and they want to take a piece of Los Angeles down with them," Angel said.

"The people who grabbed Daniel are getting further away the longer we screw around here," O'Neill complained, a ragged edge to his voice.

"They're trapped in the same gridlock we are, so they're not getting anywhere very damned fast," Angel growled back. "We'll get you to the rest of your friends as soon as we pick up Cordelia. Do you have any idea who would want to kidnap Dr. Jackson?"

When Jack didn't answer, Wesley looked back at him. His face was ashen in the light of the passing headlights. He sat sideways, his right leg stretched awkwardly out along the seat. Wesley had wrapped the ankle in gauze to staunch the bleeding, then used an Ace bandage to stabilize the joint. It was all Wesley knew to do for him until they could get him to a doctor.

Cordelia was the one who had nagged Angel into carrying a first aid kit in the trunk in the first place, and Wesley felt slightly sick with worry for her. Angel wasn't saying anything out loud, but he didn't need to. Wesley knew Angel was remembering the images from the L.A. riots just the way he was

Please let Cordy be all right.

"You'd know that better than I would," Jack finally said, sounding as though he'd come to a decision.

"I'm sorry. Know what?"

"Know who would go after Daniel. This afternoon Daniel told me he thought someone had already managed to translate at least some of the manuscript. Someone who was now trying to perform the ritual it describes."

It wasn't really a surprise, but Wesley felt a little breathless all the same. "What would be the consequences of performing the ritual described in the Ishakidu manuscript?"

Jack sighed heavily. "Bad," he said. "Daniel thought the consequences would be very, very bad."

Angel made an encompassing gesture with the hand that wasn't on the steering wheel. "As bad as this?"

"Yeah," Jack said. "That bad."

"You think the people who took Daniel are the same ones who are responsible for all this," Wesley worked his way though the scraps of information slowly and carefully, and they started to tumble together like puzzle pieces falling into place. "But whoever they are, they didn't expect this degree of chaos, did they? Now they've taken Daniel in order to clean up their translation and figure out what went wrong."

"So who are they?" Angel demanded. "I could be wrong, but I get the impression people who can read Archaic Sumerian at all, even badly, aren't exactly falling off the trees around here."

"See, that's what Daniel thought you people would know," Jack said impatiently. His tone implied this was all somehow Angel's fault. "You make it your business, don't you? People who believe in -- things. Vampires and demons and magic pixie dust. Daniel thought you would know who would want to translate this and would actually have the ability to do it."

Angel turned his head just enough to catch Wesley's eye. They were on the same page here. Wolfram &amp; Hart had the resources to pick up every Sumerian scholar in the hemisphere.

Then Angel maneuvered the Plymouth through a gap in traffic and managed the left hand turn that he'd been trying to make for the last ten minutes. Wesley looked up and forgot all about ancient Sumerian.

"Aw, hell," Jack said. "You've _got_ to be kidding me."

* * *

The driver said, "The door's not opening."

The big guy on Daniel's left swore, and the one on his right said, "We could have a code red on our hands. Contact team leader and --"

"Oh, wait a minute," the driver interrupted. "There's no power. That's why the garage door won't open."

The guy on the right swore again, and Daniel was strongly tempted to laugh, but he couldn't summon the energy or the breath.

"We'll have to take him in through the lobby," said the guy on his left, and suddenly a gun was pressed to Daniel's throat. The muzzle was warm from the body heat of the man holding it. "If you say a single word, we'll kill the person you're talking to. Understand me?"

"You don't need to hurt anybody," Daniel said.

The guy on his right let his hand rest on Daniel's shoulder, and Daniel groaned in pain. "Just answer the question. Do you understand?"

Daniel clenched his jaw and held out as long as he could, pointless as it was. When the man on his right began to dig his fingers into the swelling around Daniel's shoulder, though, he burst out shakily, "I understand, dammit. Just don't hurt anybody."

"Thank you, Dr. Jackson." Daniel's tormenter released him. The pain throbbed across the tensed muscles in his chest and down his back, and Daniel concentrated on breathing until the car doors opened, and he was dragged out into the night.

The big sedan was parked in front of a gated underground garage, under a three story condominium. Daniel could see the square outline of the roof against a night brilliant with stars. From the sound of traffic he thought they were probably only a half block or so from a major road, maybe Hollywood or Sunset Boulevard, and given their rate of travel, probably no more than a mile away from the wrecked rental car and Jack. The urge to simply start running, trusting to the darkness of the night and the element of surprise was almost irresistible, but one of his captors took his elbow in a firm grip, jostling his shoulder, and Daniel went to his knees with a gasp.

He was yanked to his feet again and the pain was so extraordinary everything blurred in his mind. For a few moments he was convinced Amaunet held him pinned in the light of a hand device, though for some reason she had trained it on his shoulder instead of his forehead. "Teal'c," he muttered desperately, "Don't, please don't. Shau'ri won't hurt me."

Then he opened his eyes and looked up into a granite face that absolutely wasn't Teal'c's.

"You try a stunt like that while we're going through the lobby, and I'll have to shoot the doorman."

Daniel shook his head, meaning _please don't shoot the doorman_, and though he was crying a little from the shock of memory, he was so angry the red heat of his rage was more disorienting than the pain of a dislocated shoulder. They had no right to do this.

He was staggering as they led him up the walk, then up a low flight of stairs. Through double-paned glass doors Daniel could see a Coleman lantern sitting on a reception desk, its inadequate yellow light throwing dark shadows into the corners of the room. Daniel tried to straighten his spine, as though walking straight and tall could possibly hide the fact that his hands were cuffed together.

The doorman had apparently been waiting for them, and swung the door open. "Card keys won't work without power," he announced, sounding almost cheerful. "Neither will the elevators, actually."

"Not a problem," said one of Daniel's captors. "Dr. Jackson here can walk."

"You sure?" The doorman shone a flashlight directly into Daniel's face. "Looks like he's not in the best of shape."

Daniel forced himself to smile but didn't dare speak, holding his breath and praying that the man wouldn't train the flashlight downward toward his cuffed hands.

But then the doorman said, "You two been roughing him up? The way I heard it you weren't supposed to harm a hair on his head."

"Not our fault. We pulled him out a wrecked car down on Highland. Tell him, Dr. Jackson. We haven't laid a hand on you, have we?"

Daniel closed his eyes.

"Far as I know, no one's ever even asked him what happened to those agents up on Blewett Pass," said one of his captors. "Johnny Stophel was the man who recruited me, and no one's ever heard from him again. We lost a lot of good men up there, and if it was up to me I promise you Daniel Jackson would singing like a bird before morning." A hand fell on his shoulder again, and brilliant flashes of light exploded across his retinas. "By the way, Dr. Jackson. I suppose you can talk to the doorman if you want to after all."

Daniel was trembling in rage and pain, but he didn't speak and didn't resist as his captors walked him up a flight of stairs and down a short hallway. Mostly he was trying not to trip, because falling would have hurt so damned much, but he heard the doorman behind him talking on a phone or two-way radio. He couldn't make out the words. The light of two flashlights bounced along bare white walls and closed doors. As they reached the door at the end of the hall it opened for them, and another big guy in a suit said, "Any word on when we'll be getting the power back?"

"You could try asking Dr. Jackson,"

Daniel was pushed through the door and found himself in a plainly appointed room that looked more like a reception area than anyone's home. A battery-powered lantern stood on an end table, and there was a man sitting in a chair against the far wall. It was too dark for Daniel to see his face. "But so far all he can do is whine about his sugar daddy getting left behind."

"You don't have O'Neill?"

Daniel felt hot and cold at once, weak-kneed with relief that Jack had been left behind.

"We didn't have any orders regarding Colonel O'Neill."

"And it didn't occur to you that he'd be useful?" asked the first man, incredulous. "Never mind. We've got people in position."

The man in the shadows still hadn't spoken. Daniel was shoved into a chair, and both his ankles were secured to the legs of the chair with two more plastic cuffs. Then all three of the big men in suits disappeared into one of the inner rooms.

On their way out, though, the flashlights they carried had briefly illuminated the stranger against the wall. His face was bruised, and he looked as though he were tied to the chair just like Daniel was. When the door shut behind their captors, he finally spoke.

"Are you really Daniel Jackson?"

"Um. Yeah, I am. Who--"

"Well it's about bloody time!" the stranger interrupted him. "I have no idea what's going on here. My green card's in order, my show's premiering in less than twenty-four hours, and for the love of god, I don't even know what the initials N-I-D stand for. So would you please do me a favor and tell these thugs that you've never seen me before in your life?"

* * *

Though Los Angeles was burning, the news didn't seem to have reached West Hollywood. The bars along the north side of Santa Monica Boulevard were all open, candles flickering on tables, music blasting from battery-powered boom boxes. The sidewalks were crammed shoulder to shoulder with self-consciously beautiful men holding drinks and each other, spilling out into the gridlocked traffic, laughing and shouting.

A boy with blonde hair and a mesh muscle-shirt draped himself over the back door of the Plymouth and pushed a bottle of Sam Adams into Jack's hand. "There's no more ice," he told Jack mournfully. "We'll just have to drink it all now."

"Thanks anyway--" Jack tried to say, but the boy kissed Jack's face beerily, stroked his cheek with the hand that wasn't holding his own bottle and then melted away into the crowd.

"Robertson's only a couple of blocks away," Angel said. "I could make it to the theater faster on foot." He proceeded to inch the car up onto the sidewalk, despite the noisy, but mostly ineffectual protests of the people coming out of the bars, then turned off the ignition and handed the keys to Wesley. "I'm going to go get Cordelia. Looks like you and Jack will be all right until I get back."

"Yes," Wesley agreed, looking around himself with bemusement. "I believe the only thing in danger here is our virtue."

* * *

Paul Davis had seen the aerial surveillance from P3X-636, so at least he recognized the place.

Unfortunately, simply knowing where he was didn't help much.

For a fleeting instant he remembered this couldn't be real. They were in Santa Monica, they were having dinner, and there was no way they could suddenly be on the other side of the galaxy. Then Teal'c stumbled to his knees beside Paul, and in front of him Major Carter sprawled on her side, one arm flung outward and her fingers digging into the earth as though she were trying to keep herself from falling off the planet.

Paul raised his eyes and forgot all about Santa Monica and Indian food and the pale ale that had been sloshing in his glass moments before.

The ruins were monumental, their broken shapes blotting out a third of the sky. There was something so fundamentally wrong about them Paul couldn't force his mind to grasp what he was seeing. Objects seemed to be growing larger as they receded into the distance, and lacking the barest rudiments of perspective, he felt as though he were tumbling forward into an endless void.

He didn't realize he'd actually fallen until he bruised his knees and elbows on the wet sand.

Paul closed his eyes. He wanted to call for the others but nausea choked him, and he could feel the icy lump of his heart splintering with every contraction.

When he finally opened his eyes again, his head was turned to the side, left cheek against the ground. He could see the sand clinging to his own eyelashes, blurred suggestions of shape in the impossibly near distance, and he could see a gray plain of wet sand stretching away from him. Marring the expanse of sand and tatters of dried sea foam was a line of naked footprints.

Though Paul desperately didn't want to, he raised himself onto his elbows and strained to see who was leaving footsteps behind.

Blair Sandburg was walking alone into the ruins. He didn't waver or stumble, not even when the horizon itself heaved upward and began to stretch toward the stars.

The next thing Paul knew he was a hairsbreadth from stepping into a lane of traffic.

He stumbled backwards, arms cartwheeling to keep himself from falling. When he was safely on the sidewalk, he turned in a dazed circle, trying to figure out where he was and what had happened. Dark buildings crowded closely on either side of busy road. The power was out, car horns and alarms were blaring into the night, and the sky was full of stars.

"Major Carter!" he shouted. "Teal'c!" People were crying out all around him, and he doubted anyone heard him. "Detective Ellison!" He took a few stumbling steps up the sidewalk, thinking he recognized the black shape of a building at the next corner as the Indian restaurant where they'd been having a late dinner about a million years ago. "Dr. Sandburg!"

"Right here, man," said a hoarse, shaking voice right beside him. "You OK?"

Paul turned his head. The headlights from passing cars backlit Blair Sandburg's loose mane of hair like a halo. "I'm all right," Paul said, his own voice none too steady. "Did you -- are you--?"

"God, it beats the hell out of me. Have you seen Jim? I was looking for him in that, that _place_." His voice broke. "What the hell was that?" He pressed his palms against his forehead as if he were trying to hold his brains in. "I know. You don't know either, and you wouldn't tell me if you did. It's making me crazy, the way you people expect Jim to help you and you won't even--"

Paul took his arm and pointed up the street. "I think that's the Raj just a block away. Everyone else may still be there."

Stark relief replaced the frustration on Blair's face. "You're right," he said, and immediately darted off through the crowd, Paul scrambling to stay close. The people around them were stumbling about in a daze, clinging to each other, shouting and crying.

Then Paul heard a scream from the other side of the street and the screech of brakes, and he looked around in time to see a car suddenly plowing across the sidewalk to crash into a storefront.

Instantly a crowd formed around the car, screams becoming shouts. By the strobe of passing headlights Paul caught glimpses of the driver being dragged from the car.

"They're going to kill him," Blair exclaimed in horror. He took a step towards the street before Paul caught him and pulled him back.

"We can't help."

Blair struggled furiously to pull free. "We can't just stand here!"

Paul forcibly turned him around. "Dr. Sandburg, we wouldn't even make it across the street. Those cars aren't stopping for anyone."

Blair stopped fighting. Paul loosened his grip, and Blair angrily shook himself free, but after a long moment he turned away and didn't try again to cross. "We've got to find Jim."

"Dr. Sandburg," A man seemed to materialize out of the crowd at Blair's side. "I need for you to come with me right away."

"What?" Blair looked back at Paul. Frightened, confused people surged around them. "Who are you?" Alarms wailed monotonously, and the red and blue lights of emergency vehicles and police cars had begun reflecting off the glass storefronts.

Paul tried to push his way through to Blair, but someone was blocked his path. "Dr. Sandburg! Blair!"

"I need to take you to Detective Ellison," Paul heard the stranger telling Blair. "There isn't much time."

"Jim? Has something happened to Jim?" Blair craned his head back in Paul's direction. "Paul, do you know this guy?"

"That's far enough, Major." Someone swung him around, and Paul found himself face to face with a man he recognized.

"Agent Katz?" he said in astonishment. The man was NID, stationed in D.C. "What are you doing here? What's going on?"

"With all due respect, this is nothing you want to be involved in, Major Davis. Now's the time for you to turn around and just walk away."

"_What_? Agent, I need to talk to the senior officer on the scene immediately."

Blair suddenly cried out in pain or anger. Paul pushed his way around Agent Katz and saw two men dragging Blair towards a parked sedan. "What do you think you're doing?" Paul shouted. Neither of Blair's assailants even looked back at him. They pushed Blair down over the hood of the car, cuffing and frisking him while other people on the crowded sidewalk paid no attention at all or simply gave them a wide berth.

When they pulled Blair upright again he wasn't fighting anymore. He swung his head around to find Paul in the crowd. "These your people too?" he asked dully.

"No! Dr. Sandburg, I'm going to get to the bottom of this right now. They're not taking you anywhere."

"Last chance, Major." Agent Katz pulled his weapon and put the muzzle squarely against Paul's chest.

Paul looked down at the Sig and then at the man wielding it in utter astonishment.

This was insane.

Of course it was, he thought then, remembering the phantom airmen last night who'd invaded Jim and Blair's home, then disappeared like all the rest of the night's hallucinations.

They must still be trapped in a dream. None of this it real.

"Get out my way," Paul said, and pushed Katz aside.

Something exploded at very close range. Paul felt the blow like a kick in the chest. He tried to take another step toward Blair, but his feet were as heavy as lead. He could hardly lift them. His peripheral vision began to gray, but he saw Blair Sandburg's mouth moving, and he looked as though he were very angry, shouting something that Paul couldn't hear.

"Dr. Sandburg," he said, and was unhappy to discover that talking _hurt_. It hurt as much as breathing did.

No one caught him when he fell.


	7. Chapter 7

> Oh the sin of writing such words,--words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis! Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such words, words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are more precious than jewels, more soothing than Heavenly music, more awful than death itself.
> 
> Robert W. Chambers "The Yellow Sign" (1895)

* * *

Who knew that Hell was a black Plymouth convertible parked on a West Hollywood sidewalk?

One version of hell, anyway. The one Jack was trapped in right now.

A member of his team needed him, _Daniel_ needed him, and Jack was just sitting here with his leg propped up across the back seat. The southern horizon was smoldering red, men continued to stumble along the sidewalk from one darkened bar to the next, and the people who had dragged Daniel from that wrecked rental car were getting further away with every passing minute.

Yelling at Wyndam-Pryce would have been briefly satisfying, but Jack had to admit that wouldn't accomplish anything. Besides, as frustrating as their current circumstances were, this was the first time he found himself actually agreeing, at least a little bit, with the priorities of Angel and his odd band of associates. Of course they had to find Cordelia first. You never left one of your own behind.

"Angel should have been back by now," Wesley burst out suddenly. The wait must be getting to him, too.

"You think he's in trouble?"

"Angel? Not very likely." Wesley crossed his arms over his chest and glared hard at the next beautiful young man, beer in hand, who did a double take as he passed the car. At Wesley's growl, the young man hurried on without speaking.

"What I'm afraid is that he can't find Cordy. Dammit, surely she wouldn't go wandering around by herself while the city's going up in smoke." His tone said it was exactly the sort of thing he might expect Cordelia to do. "I want to ask you something." He turned to look squarely back at Jack. "Your friends down in Santa Monica. They're military, aren't they?"

"Oh?"

"When we found you, you asked us to call someone named Major Carter."

Must be getting old, Jack thought. A car crash, little shift in reality and some swine with human faces, and he threw elementary precautions to the wind.

"You are too, aren't you?" Wesley pressed, when Jack didn't answer him. "I don't think you're retired at all. And Dr. Jackson as well?" In the flashing car headlights Jack saw Wesley's face twist. "Angel was right all along. You were just using us to get to the Ishakidu manuscript. And now Cordelia's missing and Los Angeles is burning and you act like none of this is your fault."

"Hey," Jack interrupted. "You people are the ones who kept that chunk of green rock sitting around like an ashtray. If it weren't for Daniel's translation we wouldn't have any idea what was going on now."

"The police are here,"Wesley interrupted, pointing back down the street.

About damned time, Jack thought, turning to look. Two uniformed officers were making their way down the sidewalk. They would have radios. He could finally report Daniel's abduction, find Carter and Teal'c. "Help me up,"he demanded, pushing open the back door and struggling to get out. His bad ankle wouldn't support his weight, and the pain of trying to stand made his head swim. When his vision cleared, Wesley had his hands on Jack's shoulders and was easing him back into the car.

"I've got a better idea. You sit still, and I'll bring the police here."

Jack nodded impatiently. "Hurry." He looked back, then grabbed Wesley's sleeve. "Hold on."

"What is it now?"

"I'm not sure," Jack said. "There's something happening down there."

"Yes, I believe that would be Los Angeles going up in flames."

Jack didn't bother to respond to that. "I mean the other guys. Who are they? They're not cops."

Behind and on either side of the uniformed officers were men in civilian clothes, blending in with the crowd with all the subtlety of the Secret Service.

Or NID agents.

"No," Wesley said slowly. "No, I don't believe they are policemen."

They were looking for him, Jack knew instinctively. What's more, he was very, very certain he didn't want to be found. "Help me into that club," he demanded.

"What?" Wesley looked at Jack and then back at the closest bar. All the doors were open to the sidewalk, and the only light came from the red emergency lighting in the back. A tinny backbeat from music playing on a boom box thumped over the din of voices , and Jack could smell sweat and warm beer from here. "I thought you wanted to talk to the police," Wesley said.

"Changed my mind." They were sitting ducks if they stayed out here. "We don't have time for this now," Jack insisted. "Help me."

Wesley darted a glance over his shoulder. "They're looking for you?"

"I can't help Daniel if they find me."

"I don't believe this," Wesley complained, but finally he bent down to pull Jack's arm over his shoulders. "Act like you're drunk."

"Not a problem," Jack hissed, staggering as Wesley helped him to his feet.

"They're close."

Jack nodded his understanding. Steadying himself with one hand on Wesley's opposite shoulder, he pulled himself around until he was facing him. "Nothing personal," he muttered, then leaned in and planted one squarely on Wesley's frowning lips.

For an instant Wesley stood frozen, but just about the time Jack was starting to think he was going to end up with his ass dumped on the sidewalk, Wesley's arms went around him and he pulled Jack into a kiss that would have done any leading man proud. His mouth came down over Jack's, lips grinding hard enough to bruise, and he bent Jack over his arm at an angle that made Jack's upper back ache. He clutched at Wesley's sleeves, a little concerned about the man's ability to support him in this position.

Finally Wesley's hand went to the back of Jack's head and he eased him upwards again, only the faintest tremor in his shoulders betraying the strain. "Let's get you a drink, lover," Wesley rasped loudly.

Jack nodded, keeping his head down and wishing he knew where the NID agents were. Probably close. Wesley raised his hand and ruffled Jack's hair, effectively hiding Jack's face with his arm, and when they had made their way through the crowd to the entrance of the club, Wesley pushed him up against the door post and kissed him again. It was a relief for Jack to rest against the wall, and Wesley's kiss was much gentler against Jack's numbed lips this time, now that he wasn't taxed with supporting Jack's entire weight.

Finally he nudged Jack's head to the side and whispered in his ear, "They're past us. Still want to go in?"

Jack continued to resist the urge to look for himself. "At least until we're sure they're gone."

Wesley nodded, his cheek to Jack's. "I just need a moment." He was breathing hard. Jack remembered the bullet wound Gunn had mentioned, and wondered if Wesley were completely healed from it. If he collapsed now, Jack would be helpless.

He nuzzled Wesley's face and leaned forward to ask. "Sure you can do this?"

"I'm fine." Wesley drew back, sounding affronted. "Let's go."

Jack put his arm over his shoulders again and allowed Wesley to lead him into the darkness of the club. They were instantly surrounded by bodies, shirtless, sweating, bumping up against them. Jack was forced to lean harder on Wesley to avoid being knocked to the ground. The air was thick with cologne and stale beer, and the dull red light from the exit signs obliterated individual features.

"Back wall," Wesley whispered breathlessly. "You can rest there."

Jack nodded, trying to stay focused even though the pain of walking on his bad ankle made his vision blur. He wondered if the men surrounding him knew this was the end of the world. Maybe they did. There were worse ways to go than dancing the apocalypse away.

Or screwing it away. Wesley finally reached the wall near the bathrooms, and on one side of them two men were caressing a third who lay back in their embraces, shirtless, languorous with pleasure. Jack turned his head the other way and found his face only inches from a man who was being slowly and seriously fucked up against the wall. His eyes were squeezed shut, his fist clenched, and he beat the wall in time with his partner's strokes.

Jack closed his eyes against a sluggish wave of arousal, unwanted and drearily impersonal. If he thought about Daniel right now he'd probably start to cry. Or hit somebody.

Then Wesley murmured, "They seems rather uninhibited, " in such a clipped, dry voice Jack was surprised into a snort of laughter. He opened his eyes and found himself blinded by the glare of a flashlight.

Christ. They were back.

"Get down," Wesley said urgently. "Hurry up, just get on the floor." He was pushing Jack down with one hand, supporting some of his Jack's weight with the other as Jack painfully slid down the wall until he was kneeling on the sticky floor, clenching his teeth against the grinding sensation in his bad ankle.

"They're coming this way," Wesley hissed. He leaned forward over Jack, propping himself against the wall with his forearm over his head.

Jack got it. He yanked Wesley's shirt out of his jeans, unbuttoning the lower buttons so the flaps hung in his face. He unzipped his jeans and laid his face against Wesley's open fly. At once Wesley cradled the back of Jack's head with his other hand and began to moan in gamely simulated passion. Jack pulled on his belt loops and after a moment's hesitation Wesley carefully rocked his hips forward, crowding Jack against the wall and hiding his face. He moaned more loudly, sounding pretty ridiculous but not necessarily inauthentic.

When this was all over, Jack thought, if they survived and didn't end up spending the rest of their lives in NID holding cells somewhere far beneath the Nevada desert, and, oh yeah, if the world didn't end, he was really going to owe Wyndam-Pryce a drink.

* * *

The tattered king had returned.

He stood in the far corner of the nearly-bare condominium living room, pudgy hands clasped under his lack of a chin, pallid skin glowing faintly in the darkness. Daniel didn't have to open his eyes to see him. He didn't even have to look in his direction. The mere insistence of his presence had imprinted itself into Daniel's flesh.

The other man in the room, the hapless stranger who had been trying to put on a play, didn't seem to have noticed the silent third. Daniel had an absurd horror that he _would_ eventually notice, and that a stranger and an outsider seeing Daniel's personal demon would just make the thing all that much real.

So he was rambling on like a man trying to hide a terrible guilt. The stain of agony spreading from his shoulder muddled his thoughts. His fingertips were going numb, and he worried the dislocation could have cut off the flow of blood or perhaps caused nerve damage, but it seemed a distant and unimportant concern next to the possibility that the man without a face might begin to _talk_ to him once more.

"Tell me about the play. Who's author, what's it about, why did you decide to produce it? Who the actors are. Where the theater is. How long you've been planning this." _I'm chattering like a damned magpie,_ Daniel thought, dazed and slightly hysterical. "Maybe that'll give us a clue what the NID wants with you."

"Maybe a textual analysis would help, too," the stranger snapped. "Derrida, Foucault? Or are you one of those dreary prigs who feel deMan's writings in _Le Soir_ irrevocably tarnished entire post-modernist enterprise? For Christ's sake, man, that's not going to get us out of here."

Daniel swallowed and closed his eyes. He felt the presence of the tattered king like a blast from an open meat locker. "If you have another suggestion I'm willing to listen," he said, though he really wasn't. If he started to listen there was no telling what might be talking to him. "Otherwise I suppose we can both sit here and stare at each other in the dark."

The stranger snorted and didn't answer. As the silence lengthened between them Daniel felt panic beginning to build from his gut, and he was on the verge of bursting out with anything at all, reciting the multiplication table in Ancient Phoenician, _anything_ to fill the void, when the other man said grudgingly, "It's Castaigne's _King in Yellow_. The most famous unperformed play in English." He shifted in his chair, pulling ineffectually at his handcuffs. "And likely to remain that way."

"Castaigne," Daniel repeated. "I know that name from somewhere."

"You'd know it if you'd ever made a study of the particularly ineffectual fin de siecle occultists. He was a minor member of Madam Blavatsky's circle, joined the Society for the Investigation of Paranormal Phenomenon, was even one of Crowley's sycophants for a short time. Though he wasn't much of an occultist, by all accounts he was a pretty fair scholar of ancient languages. Ancient Sumerian had barely been recognized as a distinct language by then, and no one knew what to make of a recently discovered tablet in that language. Castaigne couldn't translate it either, but he did use it as the basis of his single remembered piece of literary output. _The King in Yellow._"

Daniel could feel his heart thudding in his chest. "Used the tablet? Used it how, exactly?"

"The entire play is an elaborate pun. He couldn't translate the Sumerian ideograms, but he knew how to pronounce them. _The King in Yellow_ is a phonetic transcription of the Sumerian tablet - the Sumerian syllables buried in English words. Quite clever, really."

"Clever," Daniel echoed weakly. Dear God. "This tablet. You're talking about the Ishakidu manuscript Randolph Carter found in Babylon in 1887, aren't you?"

"So you _do_ know what this is all about!" the other man burst out furiously. "Bloody hell. What kind of game are you people playing at? Who are you really? Did they send you in here to look like a fellow captive -- get my sympathy so I'd tell the people you work for everything? You stupid bastard, I've got nothing to hide. All you had to do is ask."

"All right, I'm asking," Daniel said wearily, seeing no point in trying to argue with the man. "_The King in Yellow_ is actually the Ishakidu manuscript read aloud." His stomach turned over as he tried to grasp the implications. "I ... can see why it's never been performed."

"Castaigne tried. Supposedly his actors all went insane trying to learn their lines."

"And you thought it would be a good idea to try again?" Daniel said incredulously.

"That's just a story. Fairy tales, like the legends that have sprung up around Aleister Crowley. The dreary truth is Castaigne was a drunk who didn't know how to manage his money and the production folded before opening night. Good Christ, is _that_ why I'm here? Your government actually believes those old ghost stories?"

"If you don't believe them, why did you want to put on the play?"

"It's a living piece of theatrical history. Have you even read my press release?"

The inner door burst open, and flashlights threw harsh beams across the floor. "All right," said one of their captors. "Time to get this show on the road."

"Please listen to me," Daniel said. "This is extremely important. _The King in Yellow_ is very, very dangerous. Don't let anyone look at it. Whatever you do, don't let anyone read or recite from it aloud."

"Is that your advice, Dr. Jackson?"

"Whatever you're trying to do here, you've got to stop. I know you think the Ishakidu manuscript explains how the Revenuers defeated the goa'uld, and maybe it does, but you've got to believe me, the price is too high. The Revenuers did it by awakening their sleeping god, and it drove every sentient species in the galaxy insane. Do you have any idea how long it took mankind to climb back down from the trees last time?"

"The goa'uld?" said the producer. "The Revenuers?"

"That's fascinating, Dr. Jackson." Another of the NID agents walked up to him, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket. He wadded it into a ball and proceed it to cram it into Daniel's mouth despite his furious protests. "But we'll let you know when we're in need of your expert opinion."

* * *

> Among the Assyrians the Ekimmu might appear in a house. Just as the Vampire, it would pass through walls or doors, and whether it merely glided about as a silent phantom, or whether it gibbered uttering unintelligible and mocking words with hideous mop and mow, or whether it seemed to ask some question that required a response, in any case such an apparition was terribly unlucky.
> 
> _The Vampire, His Kith and Kin,_ Montague Summers [1928]

* * *

That popping sound out on the street might have been gunfire, but Sam continued to hold the little penlight from her bag steady. "Is he showing any signs of coming out of it? We've got to find Paul and Blair, and it sounds like a war zone out there."

"It sounds, rather, like frightened civilians in the throes of panic." Teal'c put two fingers under Ellison's throat. "But I concur with your assessment of our immediate priorities. As far as Detective Ellison's physical status, his pulse is very rapid, so I do not believe he is suffering from the 'zone out' effect."

"The 'zone out effect'?"

"You have not read Dr. Sandburg's dissertation?"

"No, I, ah, didn't get around to that." Around them, the restaurant was largely empty, most of the customers and staff having fled into the night. Teal'c and Sam had tipped their table on its end and were crouched behind the makeshift barrier.

Teal'c gently shifted Ellison's shoulders, pulling him around until his head was resting on Teal'c's thigh. He held Ellison's right hand with his own, and let his left hand cover Ellison's forehead. "You do not believe Detective Ellison actually possesses the abilities imputed to him."

"I don't disbelieve in them. I simply think that some pretty extraordinary claims have been made, and the only evidence is the word of a single researcher."

"Daniel Jackson has attested to Detective Ellison's abilities as well."

"The NID was lobbing tear gas cannisters at Daniel at the time. Not the best circumstances for making impartial observations. Teal'c, look, the only thing that matters now is whether Jim is going to come out of this on his own, or if we need to get him medical attention."

"I do not know," Teal'c sounded unhappy. "I believe Detective Ellison's may have been overwhelmed when we suddenly found ourselves on P3X-636, and that his current non-responsiveness is a necessary form of self protection. Dr. Sandburg has documented instances when it took several days for Detective Ellison's senses to resume their normal functioning."

"Several _days_?" Sam mentally ran through their immediate options. None of them were good.

"It is indeed unfortunate that Dr. Sandburg has become separated from us, since his assistance in evaluating Detective Ellison's condition would be invaluable. An irony, given that Detective Ellison would be capable of finding Blair Sandburg for us, were he not unconscious." Teal'c bent closer over Jim and patted his cheek. "Detective Ellison," he said formally. "We are in need of your immediate assistance."

Sam didn't know if it were just his imagination, but Jim seemed seemed to tense. Teal'c went on, "Blair Sandburg is in need of your assistance," and this time there was no mistake. His back arched from the floor and his fingers tightened around Teal'c hand. Sam reached forward to take Jim's other hand.

Jim's eyes opened, and then he turned his face away at once, squinting against her penlight. She hastily shut it off. "Jim. Detective Ellison. Are you all right?"

"They've got Blair." he said in a low, rasping voice.

"What? Who's got Blair?"

Jim kept his face turned away, his eyes clamped shut. "I thought the NID wanted _me_," he whispered, and Sam wasn't sure if he was answering her question or not. "Why did they take Sandburg instead?"

* * *

"I think it's been long enough," Wesley finally muttered down to Jack. "They're gone."

"About damn time," Jack groaned. "Can you help me up?"

"I've got you. Careful." Wesley wrapped his fists in the shoulders of Jack's shirt and hauled him to his feet. Jack collapsed against the wall, panting as he waited for the sharpest pain in his ankle to subside. The amorous groups on both sides had changed while he'd been on the floor, and the batteries in the portable stereo that had been supplying the music all this time were beginning to give out. No one particularly seemed to notice.

"Is there a back way out of this place?"

"Probably," Wesley said, adjusting his clothes. His hands seemed a little shaky to Jack. "There's an alley that feeds into the Pavilions parking lot. We should be able to go around that way and catch up with Angel." He pulled Jack's arm over his shoulder. "You sure you can make it? I could find Angel myself, and we could meet you back here."

The two men next to Jack had each other's jeans pulled down around their respective knees and were necking so enthusiastically they kept bumping into him. Jack didn't turn his head to see what was happening on the other side, but he could hear the creaking of a leather jacket. "I can make it," he said firmly.

The back exit had a panic bar across it and a large sign Jack couldn't read in the red emergency lighting. Someone had thoughtfully propped the door open with an empty case of Absolut. Leaning heavily on Wesley, Jack stuck his head out and looked around. The alley was very dark but hardly quiet, with tinny dance music coming from all the other clubs on this side of the street. A group of men had evidently taken the party outside and were making out near the dumpster.

"Think we're clear," Jack said, but as he and Wesley limped their way down the alley, one of the men by the dumpster called out, "Hey, what's your hurry?" and suddenly he and Wesley were surrounded. A skinny kid in a mesh T-shirt and hip-hugging jeans planted himself in front of them and thumped Wesley on the chest. "I saw you inside, dude, and I know you didn't get your money's worth in there."

"Touched as I am by your concern," Wesley said, "I can hardly see how that's any of your business."

"Nah, it's freaking me out. Really." A second kid who looked no older than the first put his arm around the shoulders of his friend, mirroring the the way Wesley was supporting Jack. "You look like you're tight, but you're in there _faking_ it. What's that all about?"

"Are you cops?" The voice from behind d them was an exaggerated falsetto. "L.A.'s going up in smoke and you're down here lookin' to bust us for indecency?"

"For fuck's sake," Jack burst out, and it wasn't hard to sound furious, especially not as angry and exasperated as he really was. "We're not cops. Now, it's already been one shitty kind of a night and believe me, you fellas are not improving my temper, so do you want to get the hell out of our way?"

The two kids in front exchanged a look. Neither of them seemed in the least intimidated, and none of the others showed any signs of backing off either.

"If you must know," Wesley tried, "And not that it's any of your business, but we were just trying to make my boyfriend jealous."

"I don't know," said one of the boys. He tilted his head back and his nostrils twitched, as though he were sniffing the air. Something about the gesture sent a weird chill down Jack's spine. "Don't you think a whiff of _spunk_ would make your boyfriend way more jealous than a fake blowjob?"

Giggles came out of the darkness.

OK, Jack thought. At this point the situation had officially gone from absurd to downright freakish. Wesley evidently thought the same thing. "Come on, Jack," he said, rearranging Jack's arm over his shoulder and straightening his back to support more of his weight. "Let's go."

"Aw, man, there's no hurry," said the kid in the mesh shirt. "Haven't you heard it's the end of the world?" He reached forward and wrapped his fists in Jack's shirt, and then to Jack's utter amazement, violently yanked him forward.

Idiot, Jack thought, enraged by the kid's audacity and by the stab of pain as his full weight came down on his busted ankle. He brought his hands up to knock the kid off him, but his hands rebounded off skinny forearms that were as immovable as steel cables. _Christ._ He drew back his fist for a punch, much as he hated having to hit a stupid, drunk child, even one who was as strong as an ox, and in that moment of hesitation the kid hauled him forward and snapped him around. Jack's bad ankle made him clumsy, and the kid was freakishly fast. The next thing he knew he was trapped in a full nelson, the kid's arms wrapped around Jack's, his hands locked at the back of Jack's neck.

"Easy there, sugar," someone said, snickering. Wesley was struggling furiously in the grip of three of the boys. "We're just helping you out here. Making your boyfriend _really_ jealous."

The kid behind Wesley grinned wolfishly at Jack over Wesley's shoulder, running his hands over his chest. Wes was fighting like a madman, but Jack forced himself to stop. There was something ludicrously wrong here, some part of the puzzle he just wasn't getting. He'd gone hand to hand with Jaffa warriors who weren't as unyieldingly strong as this pack of waifish teenage boys. Mindlessly flailing away at their attackers clearly wasn't helping the situation.

The kid fondling Wesley suddenly hissed and snatched his hand away. In the next moment he'd ripped Wesley's shirt from his shoulders.

"Leave him alone," Jack said quietly, and the kid raised his head as he tore a long stripe from Wesley's already-ripped shirt and proceeded to wrap it around his hand.

"You breeders started it," the kid told Jack, and thrust his wrapped hand into Wesley's front pocket to pull out a small wooden cross, which he threw away with a growl of disgust. He went back to touching Wesley as his companions held him, running his hands down his body, nuzzling the side of his face. "I think I know you," he said. "You're one of Angel's little mortal buds, aren't you?"

"He'll destroy you for this," Wesley said calmly. "He'll hunt you down one by one like the animals you are, and it won't be a nice, clean stake when he finds you, either. He'll string you up from a lamp post, leave you swinging to wait for dawn."

So they were dealing with personal acquaintances of Angel's here, Jack thought. Somehow, he wasn't in the least surprised.

"And what will he do when we send you after _him_?" the kid purred. "D'you think Angel will save the nice clean stake for you?"

The boy holding Jack was grinding his hips against him with easy, half-bored lasciviousness. His body was cold, seeming to leech the warmth from Jack where they touched. Despite the force he was exerting to restrain Jack, pulling backwards until Jack's shoulders and neck burned with the strain, the kid wasn't even breathing hard.

The boy holding Wesley stuck out his tongue and licked a long stripe up the side of his neck.

Wesley closed his eyes. "Don't drink, Jack," he said, raising his voice and betraying the faintest tremor in it. "No matter what they do. I have to believe it's possible not to drink."

"Everybody drinks." The kid made a guttural growl, and Jack saw something impossible happen to his face. The pressure against the back of Jack's neck suddenly relaxed. He struck out furiously, but cold, pitilessly strong hands seized him at once and bore him down. He felt gritty asphalt under his back and a weight on his chest

The face suddenly thrust against his own wasn't human.

Jack heaved himself upwards, but there were too many hands holding him down. The cold thing above him laid its monstrous face against Jack's. "Ever gotten off just before you died, man?" A skeletal hand fumbled at his crotch. The creature put his lips on the side of Jack's neck. "Guess not," it breathed, giggling again. "It's sort of a once-in-a- lifetime deal." The kisses became more insistent as Jack writhed, unable to keep himself from fighting now. He felt the bony ridge of the forehead pressing behind his ear, keeping his head turned to the side and exposing his throat. Wesley was shouting as the thing on top of Jack sucked a little bit of skin into its mouth, and then bit down with teeth like razors.

Vampires, Jack thought as his back came up off the pavement and a roar of pain and rage escaped him. God _damn_ it. Of all the crazy-ass things in this crazy-ass universe, now he had to deal with vampires too?

The thing on top of him began sucking at the small wound, probing it with its tongue. Jack's very soul convulsed in loathing. It wasn't as bad as feeling a snake munch its way into you, but it was pretty goddammed close.

And then the weight on his chest was gone. Jack instinctively clamped his hand over his throat and struggled to sit up. Wesley was half-collapsed against the side of the dumpster, his own hand pressed to his throat, his glasses missing, and in the midst of the boys was Angel, looking like a terrier loosed on a pack of rats.

Taking one boy by the shoulders he shook him so hard Jack heard the snap of his neck. He flung a second up against the wall with strength that clearly wasn't human, and when he turned, Jack saw Angel's own face wasn't human right now either. The other boys were running, and Angel tossed something after them with easy practice. One of them went rigid, arms out-flung, and then he simply wasn't there anymore. There was a brief smell in the air like a draft from a musty basement.

Jack closed his eyes. He'd gotten pretty good at this over the years, but dammit, even he needed a _second_ or two to manage a paradigm shift of quite this magnitude, and when he opened them again he was just in time to see Wesley making his way rather shakily to the bodies of the two boys on the ground. They were both starting to stir, which was clearly as impossible as everything else tonight, because Jack had just seen Angel appear out of nowhere and kill them.

"It's a clean stake for you after all," Wesley said. He sounded more sad than vindictive, and as Jack watched, he put a fat, sharpened stick against the chest of the first boy and shoved hard. He did the same to the second.

The smell of mold and dry rot suddenly became much stronger. Jack coughed, then gagged, understanding what he was smelling.

Angel stalked back to them. His face was monstrous, but his voice was testy and utterly human. "I leave you alone for five minutes, and you stumble into an entire nest? Come on, Wesley, you know they're going to be out in force on a night like this."

"We had other problems," Wesley said, sounding affronted. "There's some sort of government secret service types on the street looking for Jack."

"Yeah, I saw them. How much blood did you lose?"

"I'm all right." Wesley said. "They were just playing with us, hadn't begun feeding yet. Jack, are you OK?"

Jack wasn't entirely sure. "Probably could use a butterfly bandage if you've got one." He raised his hand and felt the warmth of liquid blood against his fingers. "You're one of them," he said to Angel.

Angel turned away. "Um. Right." He sounded abashed. " I am."

"Angel has a soul," Wesley said, as though that was some kind of explanation.

When Angel turned back he wore a human face again. "There are more bandages in the car."

"He's a _good_ vampire," Wesley continued patiently, and it was the first thing Jack had been able to wrap his head around since this evening had started. If the First Prime of Apophis could throw his lot in with a rag tag bunch of Tau'ri, Jack supposed it stood to reason a vampire could befriend humans.

As much as anything stood to reason tonight.

"Do you think this is another one of those mass hallucinations?" he asked hopefully.

"Sorry. Pretty sure this is real," Angel said. He looked at Jack with new concern. "So how much blood have you lost?"

"Did you find Cordelia?" Wesley wanted to know.

"No sign of her. According to the kid at the box office, nobody'd been at the theatre all afternoon."

"But that doesn't make any sense. What about the dress rehearsal?"

"It must have been called off. I want to stop back by the hotel, then head out to her place. Can you get up, Jack?"

"No problem."

Jack hoped he wasn't about to be sick, and continued to sit right where he was until Wesley and Angel each took one of his arms and gently pulled him to his feet. He tried to ask about Daniel, but his tongue was thick in his mouth, and the world which was already very dark faded into a soothing shade of gray.

* * *

> Very slowly the wheels approached, and, finally, I could make out a vehicle moving along the street. It came nearer and nearer, and when it passed beneath my window I saw it was a hearse. Then, as I trembled with fear, the driver turned and looked straight at me.
> 
> "The Yellow Sign" (Robert W. Chambers: 1985)

* * *

Something had gone badly awry. Paul was certain of that much, even if he couldn't put all the pieces together just yet. Things were in an SG-1-sized mess, Apophis' warships were entering the solar system or maybe replicators were going to eat the planet -- at any rate, _something_ bad was happening, and he really hoped Colonel O'Neill was on top of things because Paul was only our man under the mountain, and although he would argue Stargate Command's case to the Pentagon as eloquently as he could, in the end the responsibility simply didn't rest on his shoulders.

That much was a tremendous relief, because honestly, he had no idea what to do. He wasn't even sure what was going on.

Then he remembered Agent Katz.

Katz was posted in D.C. He had no business being out here on the West Coast.

His eyes flew open with a gasp of rage. Katz had actually pulled a gun and _shot_ him, that son of a bitch. Paul's years as liaison to the SGC had taught him all about the occasional breach of protocol, but _this_ \-- "Where is he?" Paul croaked

"You need to lie still," said a voice above him. "Stay calm, man. Everything's all right."

"Not all right," Paul gasped furiously. His chest felt like someone was going after him with a sledgehammer. "I have to talk to Colonel O'Neill."

The man above him chuckled sadly. Paul couldn't make out his face in the darkness. "I wouldn't mind seeing Colonel O'Neill either. He owes me dinner, did you know that? He showed up on Christmas day at Jim's place, him and Teal'c and Major Carter, ate all the roast chicken and reshteh polo while I was so nervous and scared for Jim I couldn't eat a bite."

"Dr. Sandburg," Paul tried to say, but another swing of the sledgehammer against his ribs smashed his words to inarticulate bits.

"Hey, easy. You've got to lie still. Don't try to talk."

"I've been shot," Paul finally managed to whisper.

"I know. But you're gonna be all right, I promise."

"Why did he do it?"

"How would I know? They're your goons, aren't they?" Blair burst out. Then his gentle hand touched Paul's forehead. "Aw man, don't pay any attention to me. I'm just a little freaked out here, that's all."

"They came back for me," Paul insisted weakly. "Why would they do that?"

Blair was silent. Paul had begun to to suspect the sledgehammer was the beating of his own heart. The terrific pressure on his left side had to be the palm of Blair's Sandburg's hand, pressing hard and trying to keep the blood in his body.

"Please," Paul whispered. "Tell me what you know."

Blair sighed unhappily. "First you've got to be calm, and you've got to stop trying to talk. Deal?"

Paul nodded a tiny amount. He'd figured out they were in a moving vehicle, but they weren't going anywhere very fast. Sirens were blaring, and he saw the occasional flash of blue or red out of the corner of his eye.

"I don't know how much you remember, but you were trying to help me, and one of them turned around and shot you." Blair's voice sank so low it nearly broke. "They did it right in front of me, and you were --" Paul felt the ends of Blair's hair falling in his face. He must have bowed his head. "They were hustling me into the back of this van and I was yelling at them and after that I really don't know. They went back and got you and they even took my handcuffs off so I could try to help."

"And the rest of it?" Paul gasped.

"Major Davis, that's it. Paul. Don't worry about it now. Just concentrate on staying calm and --"

"No." Paul wasn't sure of much right now, but he knew for certain that Blair Sandburg wasn't telling him the whole story. "I'm probably dying."

"Don't be crazy."

"I deserve to know the truth."

"Jesus," Blair whispered miserably. His hand continued to press hard against the side of Paul's chest, and the pain came down like walls of water, deep as the ocean. Paul cried out, knowing the crash of the waves would hide his voice, but when the water receded he heard a man yelling himself hoarse.

That was him, Paul thought, but he couldn't make himself stop.

"It's all right," Blair was chanting above him. He sounded scared out of his mind, but underneath his fear was a thread of calm, as though deep down he knew he could make it better by the force of his will alone. Paul desperately wanted to believe him. "It's all right, I'm here, it's all right."

When the pain ebbed enough for Paul to form words again he said, "Tell me." His throat was burning, and more than anything he wished he could have a drink of water.

"Whatever they're planning, we'll fight them," Blair whispered. "_I'll_ fight them, and I won't let go, and you'll be all right. They went back for you because one of them said -- he said they might need an extra."

"An _extra_?" Paul groaned, incredulous.

"In case Daniel Jackson doesn't survive long enough."

So they had Dr. Jackson, Paul thought despairingly. Almost certainly the Colonel as well.

"Do you know what they meant?" Blair asked, his voice grim and quiet. "What's Daniel supposed to do?"

End the world? Paul wondered. He whispered, "If I'm the extra, what does that make you?" He had an insane urge to laugh, and he might have done it too, if he hadn't been so certain laughter would kill him. "Second runner up?"

Blair did laugh. It came out closer to a sob. "I don't think so, man. One of them told me I was the dead man's switch."

* * *

It just figured that Cordelia would turn up like this, sweeping through the front door with an entire damned entourage in tow, no explanation at all except, "On my God, do you have any idea what the traffic's like out there?"

Gunn shot to his feet. "Jesus, Cordy, are you all right?"

"Any reason I shouldn't be?" There were half a dozen or more people with her, guys so pretty and so much smaller than life they had to be actors, women as lovely as Cordelia, dressed in jeans and the kind of white T-shirts you bought on Rodeo Drive. "I think I've survived traffic jams on Hollywood Boulevard before now," she informed Gunn airily. The most bewildering of her new friends were a couple of big guys in conservative business suits who were exploring the the candle-lit lobby of the Hyperion as though they owned they the place.

"Angel and Wes are out looking for you." Gunn eyed the strangers who seemed bent on making themselves entirely at home. "We were worried with all the other crazy stuff going on."

"Crazy stuff?" Cordelia interrupted, lowering her voice significantly. "There is no _crazy stuff_," she warned him. "It's just a blackout." She raised her voice again. "Anyway, I told everyone we could have the dress rehearsal here. We're going to to set up in the courtyard. There should be enough light from the moon so we're not tripping over each other, don't you think? And would you mind finding some more candles? It's a little grim in here."

"Cordy--"

She looked around. "Isn't Angel here?"

"I just told you. He and English are out looking for you," Gunn found himself gritting his teeth to keep from yelling. "We were worried."

"I was really hoping he could meet everyone. Oh well. Hey guys, this is Gunn. I told you about him, but really he's all right."

Someone grabbed his hand and shook it. "_Such_ a pleasure," the beautiful stranger cooed. "You're just as authentic as Cordy promised."

"Uh, great. Cordelia--" He pulled her away. "Are you sure this is such a good idea? Seems like there's a hell of a lot of crazy ass shit going down tonight."

"We don't want to impose," said one of the men in a suit.

"Oh, don't be silly!" Cordelia protested. "This is perfect. Gunn thinks so, too."

"As long as you're sure," the man said. Then in a slick, seamless gesture he pulled a SIG from his shoulder holster and placed the muzzle squarely against Gunn's forehead.

"Easy, son," he said. "We'd rather not spill any blood in here just yet."

Gunn stared back, every muscle tensed and trembling. He was furious at himself for not having spotted the concealed weapon. So freaked out over those hallucinations earlier he hadn't noticed the real threat until it was too late.

"Cordy," he said carefully. "Get out of here. Just run like hell. He can't shoot both of us at the same time."

"That's cute, Gunn, really," Cordelia lowered her voice. "But would you please try not to embarrass me in front of my colleagues?"

"It's the ambiance of the place," someone interrupted. "It's a shame this is just a rehearsal. Cordelia, don't you wish we could put on the whole show here?"

"Oh, I'd love to! But Angel would never go for it. Gunn, where did you say Angel was again?"

Gunn looked as far to the left as he could without turning his head, trying to see her face. "He's out," he said, keeping his voice nice and level. The muzzle was pressing against his forehead hard enough to hurt. "Uh, how about you, girl? Are you sure _you're_ feeling all right?"

"Maybe a touch of stage jitters," she whispered. "Don't tell anyone. "

"Cordy--"

"Get on your knees," directed the man with the SIG. "Do it real slow so I don't get nervous and blow your head off. That might give Ms. Chase an even worse case of the jitters."

"Seriously, darling," Cordelia said as she moved out of Gunn's restricted line of sight. "I think it would be _wonderful_ to stage the show here, but where would we seat the audience?"

Someone was moved behind Gunn. He was aware of the body heat of a person standing too close.

"The agent told you to get on your knees, boy," said the man behind him. Then he cold-cocked him with a gun he must have pulled from his own holster.

Gunn's knees folded under him, and when he hit the ground he curled into a ball, panting and trying to breathe around the explosion of red at the back of his skull. From across the room he heard the bright, brittle ring of Cordelia's laughter.

"Oh, Gregor!" she exclaimed. "You're positively _unreal_!"

* * *

"I know you don't give a hang what happens to us," complained the would-be producer of the _King in Yellow_. "But there's no reason for you to be so damned bloody-minded about it. Can't you see the poor bastard has a dislocated shoulder?"

Daniel would think later this should have been his first clue, but at the time, he'd been too light-headed from pain and shock to think about much of anything but the imminent end of the world if he couldn't convince these idiots not to perform the _King in Yellow_.

"Two minutes, " the producer said. "Just lay him out on the floor for me, and as long as nothing's fractured I can get him fixed up. Don't tell me it wouldn't be easier to move him if he weren't weaving and staggering around like a drunkard from the pain."

Daniel heard the smack of flesh on flesh, and an outraged yelp from the producer. "You didn't have to do that," Daniel tried to say. It came out as a moan through his gag.

The producer was clearer. "Oh, very good," he finally said, his voice a little thick. "Just hit anyone who tries to help."

Daniel winced to himself, expecting to hear another blow, but instead, one of the men dragging him forward muttered, "What the hell," and Daniel was dropped unceremoniously to the floor. The impact made the edges of the world go fuzzy, and when he was able to open his eyes again, the lights from flashlights and candles bled wetly across his vision.

"Over on his back," the producer said impatiently. "What kind of field training do you people get anyway?"

Roughly as Daniel was turned, he was grateful they didn't roll him over his bad shoulder. "I'll need his hands free," the producer said. "Mine as well."

As one of the agents sliced through the plastic cuffs around Daniel's wrists, he wondered if this were some sort of escape attempt, and if the producer really expected him to be able to get up and run anywhere. The man dropped to his knees beside Daniel and pulled the gag out of his mouth. "You ready?"

"Not really," Daniel whispered, trying to swallow.

"Can't say I blame you," the producer agreed. He raised his head. "One of you get down here and keep him still for me. Your hand on his good shoulder. Right, like that. Get a fistful of his shirt on the other side and hold it to the ground. A little further down his ribs. That should work." The agent who was bent over him stared down at Daniel, his face unreadable by candlelight. Daniel's shirt was stretched so tightly over his chest it had begun to constrict his breathing.

"Scream if you have to," the producer told him with a cheerful lack of sympathy. "Won't bother me."

He bent Daniel's arm at the elbow and then began to pull.

Daniel choked. His head went back and his body jerked hard despite the agent's attempts to keep him still. "Hold him," the producer snapped. He began to turn Daniel's upper arm, rocking carefully, and the gritty drag of tendon over bone was unendurable. Daniel squeezed his eyes shut and tried to keep breathing. He'd survived the unendurable before now, and besides, the producer almost had the joint in place again. Daniel could feel it. Muscle and tendons stretched to their limits in the instant before the bone finally shifted.

And then nothing at all. The producer stopped moving.

_God_, Daniel began to repeat over and over in his head. Agony muddled his thoughts, and as the moment continued to lengthen, he felt as guilty as if he really were crying out to the goa'uld. White fireworks burst behind his closed eyelids, and every throb of his pulse felt like slamming into a brick wall.

This couldn't go on any longer. It couldn't. It would be over now. And ... now. Jesus, _now_. "Please," he whimpered, but the producer continued to hold his arm motionless.

"Can you see it?" he asked Daniel calmly, and Daniel didn't know which of them had become unhinged, but clearly it was one or the other because Daniel couldn't _see_ anything at all. "Please," he moaned again, frantic for the producer to settle the joint into place or just let him go. This endless, dragging tension was tearing him to shreds. His eyes flew open, and crouched above him was the king of rags and tatters.

Daniel opened his mouth to shriek, but the air he dragged into his lungs was so foul with decay he choked. The face lowered close to his was softly white and utterly featureless, and it spoke without a mouth. The sole mercy was that Daniel didn't know the language. He couldn't force his mind to stop trying to process what he heard, though, and like a man watching a corpse floating upwards out of murky waters, the language's deep syntactical structures began to take shape in his mind.

When he began to recognize individual syllables, he felt reason tottering on her throne. They were words he had seen only hours before. Logograms preserved in mankind's oldest writings. He tried to clamp his hands over his ears, but he couldn't move, he couldn't speak, he couldn't even close his eyes as soft gobbets of flesh shivered and rippled above him. "Please," he said one last time, even though there was no one and nothing there to grant him mercy, and Katherine Langford said to him, "Are these your parents?"

"Foster parents," Daniel answered automatically. "They're dead now."

Katherine nodded and put away the photograph. "Do you have time to listen to a story?" she asked.

"I don't --" Daniel looked around himself, vaguely confused. He had been in the middle of something important, he thought. Unpleasant, but important. Rain was pounding down on the roof of the limousine and his luggage on the sidewalk was getting soaked. "Yes, I suppose I do."

"Very well, then. This is a story about a very clever woman who married a very clever man, and together they went to live in a faraway land. They were so happy with each other neither gave any thought to children, but in the fullness of time the woman conceived and brought forth a baby boy all the same."

"Me," Daniel said softly. "The baby boy was _me_."

Katherine smiled at him. "She and the clever man loved their son with all their hearts, for all that they had never prayed for a child, and the clever woman believed that her child would grow up to very clever indeed, more wise than either she or her husband. Alas, though, the clever woman and her husband finally came home from faraway lands, and here they died, leaving their son to grow to manhood as a friendless orphan, alone and unloved in the world."

"I wasn't alone," Daniel disagreed quietly. "I had mentors. Friends. "

"He was so alone that when a stranger invited him to go to faraway lands himself, he went without a backward glance. He traveled through the sky and across the desert until at last he married the daughter of a king, and then he believed he would travel no more. But the clever woman's orphan child had a restless, grasping, greedy heart, and having seen how vast the universe was, after only a year with his beautiful wife, he longed to travel once more."

"No. I never wanted to leave Sha'uri. That's not the way it was."

Katherine continued as though he hadn't spoken at all. "The clever woman came to her son in a dream, and in that dream she took the form of a little yellow bird sitting upon the branch of a cypress tree."

"I never dreamed that," Daniel protested, but he had begun to tremble. "That wasn't my mother. "

"The clever woman told her son that he would bring grief to everyone he loved if he rolled the stone away from the door, but her son thought himself far too clever to listen to advice from a little yellow bird."

Daniel covered his face with his hands. "Please," he begged. "I know what happened. I don't want to listen to this."

"And so the clever woman's son rolled the stone away from the door, and he lost his beautiful wife, seeing her no more until she gave birth to a serpent. The serpent saw that his mother's husband was clever but feckless, tender-hearted but quick to anger, greedy for travel and knowledge and power. He came to the clever woman's son in a dream, taking the form of a young boy, and he warned him that he must roll the stone away from the door no more, or all that the clever woman's son loved would surely perish. The clever woman's son wept and promised he would not, but as the clever often think themselves too wise to keep promises, so he rolled the stone away from the door a second time."

"No," Daniel said. "I won't listen to this anymore."

"And despite all that happened, the clever woman's orphan son has put his shoulder to the great stone and plans to roll it away for the third time, even if it means the end of the world."

Daniel turned away, fumbling at the latch and stumbling out into the pouring rain. Cenotaphs stretched to the horizon, and the cypress trees were full of crows who screamed insults at him. He turned slowly, wondering how to get home, wondering if he even had a home any longer, and when he turned back Jack was standing at his shoulder.

"For cryin' out loud, Daniel," he snapped, exasperated. "You trying to catch your death of cold?"

Daniel backed away, arms stretched out before him. "Keep away from me, Jack. I'll kill you, sooner or later. You can't trust me. You can't believe anything I say. "

"Uh, yeah." Jack was unimpressed. "And I'm the king of Siam. What's the heck's got into you?"

He wasn't entirely sure himself. "I don't --" One thing still stood out vividly. "I never stopped loving Sha'uri. I never would have opened the gate if I'd known what would happen. Never."

"Aw, for the love of mike--" Jack reached out and dragged him into a rough hug. "You think I don't know that? You think there's anyone around here who doesn't know that?" He ruffled Daniel's wet hair with his hand and patted his cheek. "C'mon. Let's get you the hell out of rain. You can come home with me, grab a hot shower. I'll throw some dinner together, whaddaya say?"

Daniel pulled back and looked at him. "If the world ends tonight, will it be my fault?"

Jack shrugged. "Eh, probably. But I always thought you'd be the death of us all sooner or later." He tugged on Daniel's arm and a warm flush of pain awakened Daniel to the unyielding floor beneath his back and the flashlights burning in his eyes. The ache in his shoulder went bone deep, but it was no longer unendurable. Whatever else had just happened, the producer must have succeeded in setting his arm.

"Did I pass out?" His voice came out as a croak, and he couldn't see the faces of the men above him.

"Well?" asked one of the agents.

"Nothing," said the producer. "Sorry, gentlemen."

"What do you mean 'nothing'?"

"I mean he hid behind some ludicrous, self-pitying fairy tale so impenetrable I never had a prayer of getting through. Either he's a tougher son of a bitch than you give him credit for, or he's so far round the bend up he could give Ripper a run for the money in the neuroses department. Whatever. He didn't give up a thing about the tattered king, so all that slapping me around was for nothing, thank you so very much."

The agent swore, but the producer said. "It doesn't matter. It's close now; I can feel it. Your little problem with the goa'uld should be history after tonight."

"You bastard," Daniel groaned, furious and betrayed. "Who _are_ you?"

"Oh, one thing I did get from him. I think Dr. Jackson wouldn't half fancy a back scuttle from his commanding officer, for what that's worth. It really is a shame you didn't grab Colonel O'Neill when you had the chance."

* * *

> "There was a time in which there existed nothing but darkness and an abyss of waters, wherein resided most hideous beings, which were produced of a two-fold principle. There appeared men, some of whom were furnished with two wings, others with four, and with two faces ... Bulls likewise were bred there with the heads of men; and dogs with fourfold bodies, terminated in their extremities with the tails of fishes: horses also with the heads of dogs: men too and other animals, with the heads and bodies of horses and the tails of fishes. In short, there were creatures in which were combined the limbs of every species of animals. In addition to these, fishes, reptiles, serpents, with other monstrous animals, which assumed each other's shape and countenance."
> 
> Fragments of Chaldæan history, Berossus: From Alexander Polyhistor (I.P. Corey translation: 1832)

* * *

The street was still crowded with cars, but the sidewalk had begun to clear as people finally made their way to home and shelter. Jim found Major Paul Davis' blood congealing on the concrete half a block away from the Indian restaurant. "The bullet didn't hit an organ," he said, his voice tight. "And it's probably still in him."

Major Carter trained her flashlight on the bloodstains, and Jim looked away, up into the night sky. The moon had turned red from the smoke in the air. "How can you possibly know that?" she asked.

"Organs ... smell."

She didn't flinch. "What I meant was, how can you be sure this is Paul's blood? Do you smell blood _types_? How is that possible?"

Jim shrugged, vaguely nostalgic for the old days. Keeping this sentinel business a secret had been less trouble than the explanations. "Sandburg has theories about how I'm able to process sensory input on a molecular level. Mostly I try not to think about it too much."

Teal'c had knelt to examine the bloodstains, and Jim stepped away from him. Speaking of things he didn't want to think about. It wasn't getting any easier to ignore the sounds of the creature Teal carried inside him. The thing shifted, squelching and pushing like a baby in the womb, and it smelled like the mud from the bottom of a swamp. Or like the insides of a gutted catfish. "But I know this is Major Davis's blood because I heard him get shot."

"Do you know why?" Teal'c asked, rising to his feet.

"Why they shot him? Because he was trying to help Sandburg," Jim answered bleakly. "What does the NID want with him?"

"I don't know," Major Carter said. "Are you sure they were NID? With everything that's going on tonight --"

"I'm sure."

"You can track them," Teal'c announced calmly.

_What do you think I've been trying to do all along?_ Jim didn't say. He'd been pushing as hard as he dared, but if he lost himself now, he'd be no use to Blair.

"No, I can't," he told Teal'c. "We'll have to follow them the old fashioned way, hope we can catch up to them in traffic."

"Dr. Sandburg and Major Davis can't be more than a mile away," Teal'c said. "In his dissertation, Blair Sandburg documents instances where you have found people over considerably greater distances."

"Not tonight," he said shortly, turning around and stalking away. "I'm getting the car. You want to help, you can come with me. Otherwise I'll do it myself."

"Detective Ellison. Jim." Carter stood in his way. "Of course we're coming with you. But Paul could be bleeding to death even as we speak. If there's even a chance your abilities could even the odds --"

"There isn't." Not now. Not like this.

"You are afraid to try," Teal'c announced.

There was no point in getting angry. "You have no idea what you're asking me to do."

"Perhaps not. It is necessary all the same. If you attempt to calm and distance yourself from your emotional reaction to this night's events, I believe you will be able to focus past the smell of burning chemicals and the multitudinous sounds of a frightened populace and find Blair Sandburg and Major Davis."

"That's what you believe," Jim answered flatly.

"They are both in dire need of your assistance, and what is more, I am certain Blair Sandburg thinks you will use your abilities to help him now. He has, after all, spend the last four years of his life teaching you to control them."

The man just didn't know when to give up. If only the problem really were a little smoke and noise. "I am going to find Sandburg. I just don't need these -- these _senses_ to do it."

"That is not a reasonable response." Teal'c put his hand on Jim's shoulder and Jim whirled furiously, knocking Teal'c's arm away. Completely unfazed, Teal'c continued, "I can help you achieve a meditative state which will allow you to use your senses to your greatest ability, even under these circumstances."

"You don't understand. On the flight down, Sandburg was terrified. He told me I couldn't risk zoning or even light meditation while I was here because the -- whatever it is -- the _darkness_ was so close." Even talking about it made Jim more aware of the emptiness that was slowly crowding out existence. "If I lose myself in that, I won't be able to help Sandburg."

Jim imagined himself catatonic or worse, utterly helpless while Blair was in the hands of the NID. He wouldn't risk abandoning Blair like that, even if this was the end of the world. He couldn't.

"I will not permit you to lose yourself to the darkness," Teal'c said.

"And what makes you think you could stop it?"

"I have spent most of my life learning to meditate in the presence of evil." Teal'c placed the palm of his hand over his own belly. Jim heard the thing inside him move, and even after everything that had happened tonight, he felt a frisson of pure horror.

"You _communicate_?"

Teal'c inclined his head slightly. "It is aware of me, as I am of it. It would destroy me if it could."

Jim looked to Carter. Skeptical, scientific Major Carter who didn't believe Jim could differentiate blood types. Her lips were pressed tightly together, but her eyes were soft with sympathy. She believed every word Teal'c was saying.

"It's not the same thing. It couldn't be."

"Nor is it entirely dissimilar. Detective Ellison, if you trust me, I believe I can be your guide in this. "

* * *

Jack knew this place.

The lobby was straight out of old Hollywood. Marble tiles as slick as death, a grand staircase sweeping up to the mezzanine as though just waiting for the chorus line, deco furnishings, palm trees in pots. Through glass doors Jack could see an open courtyard where a fountain glittered and splashed in the sunlight. People were everywhere, in the lobby, out in the courtyard, their voices an undifferentiated drone save for the occasional sparkle of laughter. As Jack made his way around the edges of the crowd he scanned the faces for someone he knew, but everyone was a stranger to him.

Just as well, really, because it wasn't as though he had time to stand around making idle conversation. Not when Daniel was waiting upstairs.

He impatiently punched the elevator button twice, watching the reflections of the people behind him in the brass elevator doors. Their images were ghostly, slipping like spirits across the polished surface, and it was a relief when the doors finally opened. He scooted in, and when he turned around the lobby was filled with monsters.

They lowed and bleated, hissed and mewled. Human features and limbs emerged from furred and feathered bodies like cancerous excrescences. A toad with a single bright blue eye on the top of its head blinked up at Jack from the marble floor. A lamb still bloodied and wet from its birthing staggered behind, struggling to push itself upright on slender black human forearms.

God, let this be a dream, Jack prayed as he fell backwards, hitting the back wall of the elevator hard as the doors finally closed. If there was anything holy left in the universe, this had to be just another dream.

But in the millions of years it took the elevator to reach Daniel's floor, Jack forgot his hope that none of this was real, and he began to beat his fist against his thigh in an agony of impatience. Daniel had probably fallen asleep waiting for him. He would have no idea the world had cracked wide open and the inhabitants of Hell were teeming across the surface. All alone in a lousy room in a haunted hotel, innocently trusting that Jack would take care of him.

When the elevator doors opened, Jack heard a faint tune floating down the dark corridor.

Irving Berlin.

He ran. The dark flowers on the carpets twined around his feet, and the vines on the darker wallpaper reached out for him on either side. The electric wall sconces flickered like candlelight and the corridor grew longer as he ran, but Jack was indefatigable, pushing harder even when the air became as thick as molasses, even when gravity itself seemed to be dragging him down to the writhing floor. It was like trying to run on P3X-636, and the instant he thought that, he found himself standing at the door of Daniel's room. He felt for his keys before realizing the door wasn't quite closed.

Jack's every instinct screamed for him to immediately fling the door open wide and go to Daniel, but he forced himself to sidle up as quietly as he could and put his ear to the panels first. When he heard nothing but a faint rustling, he gently pushed open the door.

The first thing he saw was Daniel curled on his side in bed, his back turned and the sheets pulled up almost to his bare shoulder. The lamp was on, and a small yellow book lay on the bedside table. Jack breathed a soul-deep sigh of relief and turned to lock the door behind himself. Then it occurred to him to wonder, if Daniel were sound asleep, just what he had heard rustling in the bedroom.

He turned back.

Something was in bed with Daniel. Huddled under the sheets on the far side of the bed. Lumpy and bunched up, like a person rolled up into a tight ball, except, somehow, not quite. Jack inched forward, his mind on the unspeakable creatures filling the lobby downstairs. "Daniel," he whispered, heartsick. "Daniel, for the love of God."

The thing beside Daniel awoke first, uncurling from beneath the sheets and then emerging from the bedclothes in a fury, violently jostling Daniel as it tried to clamber upright. It had a man's face and shoulders and the hindquarters of a boar, bloated genitalia hanging between its haunches and cloven hooves tearing at the carpet.

Daniel lay motionless, looking up at the ceiling and blinking, no expression on his face at all.

Jack lunged forward and dragged Daniel out of bed and away from the monstrosity that stamped its hooves and screamed in frustration because it couldn't stand upright. As Jack backed away, Daniel's head hanging and his feet dragging the floor, the creature's arms crooked and lengthened, growing into vast, leathery wings. Still roaring, it shook its head so violently its features blurred and disappeared, and suddenly there were two heads shaking and screaming upon the corrupt memory of human shoulders, then four, each facing a separate direction and shrieking in its own tongue

Daniel was a deadweight in his arms, slipping further down the more tightly Jack tried to hold him. He pleaded as he fought to hold him, begging Daniel to snap out of it, to help Jack get them both out of here. The unspeakable perversion which had crawled out of Daniel's bed had finally managed to stand nearly erect. It had eight wings now. They beat wildly, covering and uncovering each of its faces in turn. All but stupified with horror, it occurred to Jack that he'd never suspected the sight of the tattered king had actually been a _mercy_, shielding them from what lay beyond.

Then Jack was floundering his way back to consciousness, the night air cold on his face. "Daniel," he said, and a warm hand came down over his mouth to silence him. "Quiet," Wyndam-Pryce whispered urgently. "You lost more blood than we realized, but I think you're going to be all right."

Jacked rolled his eyes back to look at the night sky overhead. He could hear the nearby roar of traffic. When Wesley finally lifted his hand Jack said, "We've got to find Daniel."

"We have," Angel said from the front seat.

Wesley helped him sit upright. Jack's head spun, but when he could finally focus he saw they were half a block down and across the street from the Hyperion. Two cars were parked in the half-loop at the front entrance. By the harsh glare of their headlights he could see four men surrounding a fifth who walked very slowly, his head bowed.

Daniel.

A moment later and they had disappeared into the hotel.

"Is there a delivery entrace?" Jack immediately demanded. "A place that size, there's got to be a way in through the basement, some place they won't know to guard."

"Take it easy," Angel said, infuriatingly. "I've got it covered. They've got Gunn and Cordelia in there, too."

"Angel and I will go in and take care of them," Wesley announced. "But if there's anything you know about those men that you're not telling us --"

"There's something you're not telling me," Jack interrupted. He was already forgetting the details of his dream, which he could hardly regard as anything but a mercy, but the gist of it remained cold and clear as ice. "What is it that makes your damn _office space_ ground zero for the apocalypse?"


	8. Chapter 8

> "And in the word CHAOS let the book be sealed."
> 
> Liber B vel Magi (in the philosophy of Thelema)

The Hyperion is quite special," the producer announced cheerfully, ushering Daniel into the darkened lobby with the help of four NID agents. "We were lucky to get it on such short notice."

The candles burning along the reception desk and placed upon every other step of the grand staircase did little to illuminate the shadowy spaces, but Daniel could see people standing around in groups, and he could hear the lilt of voices from the far ends of the room. He took a cautious step away from the producer, and when no one tried to stop him, he raised his voice and said, "Angel? Wesley? Are either of you here?"

He saw the NID goons moving from the corner of his eye, but the producer shook his head and they stopped. Emboldened, Daniel said more loudly, "Excuse me, anyone. These men are holding me against my will. "

There was no break in the conversations around the lobby. As far as he could tell, no one even looked in his direction. "Please," he tried again, his right arm cradled awkwardly against his chest. "I need help."

No one except the producer paid any attention to him. He might as well have been talking to a room full of ghosts.

"Are you quite done?" the producer said. "I was wondering if you had noticed the special atmosphere of this place when you were here earlier."

"How long have you been watching me?" Daniel asked angrily.

"You see, apparently a Thesulac demon migrated here from the Mojave desert with the Tongva people some fifteen hundred years ago, give or take a century or two. Something must have attracted it to this spot, or perhaps the Tongva imprisoned it here themselves. There's so much we don't know about aboriginal binding spells. At any rate, it was still here for the Spanish incursion and then the Yank invasion -- it must have glutted itself during those years -- and to all indications it was still here as late as six months ago, when I presume Angel and his happy band of amateur demonologists finally exorcised it. Such philistines. No appreciation for history. Fortunately, the site's still spic and span after a millennium and a half of a psychic vampire feeding here. Practically any place else on the West Coast, we'd have to spend a week purifying the grounds before we'd have a chance of raising the Tattered King."

Daniel realized his mouth was hanging open after that incredible speech, and he snapped his jaws shut before turning to the NID agents. "Did you listen to that? And you still believe he's _sane_? Do you have any idea at all what you're helping this man achieve? He won't just destroy the goa'uld, he'll destroy everything."

"Yes, quaint idea, that. Your notion that all the magicks in the world are simply remnants of an ancient alien technology. The Revenuers, yes? So our friend the Thesulac demon, for instance, is simply a leftover from the last time the Revenuers wiped out your enemies on the grand scale. Demons, vampires, gods and devils, all just the psychic radiation from a two-million year old atom bomb."

"You've got to listen to me," Daniel pleaded with the NID agents. "Obviously you've been passing my research reports along to this lunatic --"

"Oh, now that's a bit harsh," the producer complained mildly.

"But he's gotten it all wrong. He can't control what will happen if you go through with this invocation. Nobody will be able to control it. Have you forgotten what happened the last time the Revenuers showed up? A single one of them wiped out all your men at Blewett Pass without raising a sweat. What do you think their god will do?"

The nearest agent, his expression unreadable in the candlelight, drew back his fist and punched Daniel solidly in the gut.

"Oh good lord," the producer complained as Daniel dropped to his knees, retching. "Would you please stop _hitting_ him? Dr. Jackson needs to be at least reasonably lucid. I suppose it's too much to hope that he'll help with the pronunciation -- is it too much to hope? Dr. Jackson?"

Curled forward over his aching stomach, for the moment even the pain in his shoulder forgotten, Daniel grunted, "You're insane."

"Right. Well, yes, I suppose that answers that question."

"Ethan!" exclaimed a voice Daniel thought he recognized. "Oh, we were getting so worried!"

He raised his head in time to see Angel's associate Cordelia Chase embracing the producer and kissing both his cheeks. "We were terrified you weren't going to make it!"

"My darling Ms. Chase," The producer soothed her. "You know I wouldn't miss this for the world."

So Jack had been right, Daniel thought miserably. Angel and Wesley were involved. It must have been a setup right from the start.

"Daniel?" Cordelia said. "Dr. Jackson?"

Daniel made himself look up at her, though he was so angry his vision was blurring. "He's insane, Cordelia. If he succeeds in awakening the Revenuers' sleeping god the entire galaxy will be lost to nightmares and madness."

"Perfect chaos, in other words," the producer said happily. "I really don't understand what you're so upset about."

One of the agents jerked Daniel to his feet as Cordelia, smiling and beautiful, told him, "I had no idea you and Ethan knew each other. Isn't this the loveliest coincidence?"

"We don't know each other," Daniel gritted out.

"Oh no, really? Daniel, this is Ethan Rayne. He was one of Giles' oldest and dearest friends back in Sunnydale."

"Giles?" Daniel said, bewildered. "Sunnydale? Cordelia, I'm not sure you understand. Your - your _friend_ Ethan is trying to invoke an unfathomably ancient and alien being. For all intents and purposes, a god. If he succeeds he'll destroy the world."

She blinked at him. "I'm not really all that comfortable getting into religious conversations. No offense. It's just that people can get so uptight about the whole, you know --" she made air quotes with her manicured fingers "-- _god_ thing."

"I'm afraid we've had something of a last-minute casting change," Ethan interrupted.

Her face fell. "Oh, no. What's happened?"

"Daniel Jackson will be taking over the role of the Tattered King."

"Oh?" She looked at him, then back at Ethan. "Oh. Well, it's your play, of course." She lowered her voice and half-whispered the rest. "But I thought _you_ were going to be the Tattered King. Here it is the dress rehearsal, and Daniel doesn't even know the blocking."

"A legitimate concern!" Ethan agreed. "But if you'll recall, the Tattered King stands by the central pillar for the entire play until you speak your final lines. I believe Dr. Jackson is more than up to the challenge."

"Don't count on it," Daniel muttered.

"Oh, but I am. In fact, with a couple of minor accommodations, I assure you, you'll be perfect for the role."

Cordelia still looked dubious, but she made herself smile at Daniel. "If Ethan thinks you're perfect, then I'm sure you will be. You might want to, um --" she made vague patting motions over her face, "--maybe check in with makeup first? There's a little bit of a shine there." She wrinkled her nose sympathetically at him and then, blowing a kiss to Ethan, she melted into the darkness again.

"Cordelia --" Daniel called after her, without much hope.

"Don't worry about Ms. Chase," Ethan said. "She already knows her part. Such a good student, really. So, I think we're ready to get started here." He gestured to the agents. "Can we go ahead and get Dr. Jackson in position, please? Oh, and _try_ to do it without hitting him again. I understand we have his body double lined up?"

Two of the agents grabbed Daniel without ceremony and marched him to the center of the lobby. "You can't allow Ethan to go through with this," Daniel told them desperately. "The last time the Revenuers awoke their god, it destroyed every sentient species in the galaxy. Why would I lie to you about this? I hate the goa'uld just as much as you do, but there's no point in killing them if we destroy ourselves in the process."

"From what I understand, Dr. Jackson," said one of the agents, "you've actually got a hell of a soft spot for snakeheads. Your wife's little bastard is the goa'uld to end all goa'ulds, isn't he?"

"You stupid, _stupid_ son of a bitch --" Daniel groaned, but the agent just laughed. Someone pointed a flashlight upwards, and Daniel saw a fat steel ring had been embedded in one of the central pillars, the granite tile splintered around it.

"You're a traitor to your species as well as to your country," the second agent said. He dragged Daniel's left arm up, and the first agent hooked his wrist to the ring with another plastic cuff. "And frankly, it's an honor to be at your execution."

"Haven't you noticed what's happening out there?" Daniel pleaded. His right arm hung all but useless from his shoulder, and the fingers on his pinioned left hand were already tingling from the lack of blood. "Can't you feel it? If you allow Ethan to go through with this it will be a hundred, a thousand times worse. Nothing will survive."

"We've got this one," someone said, and another of Angel's associates was thrust into the circle of candlelight.

Unlike Cordelia, though, Charles Gunn didn't look happy to be here. He was stumbling, held upright only by the efforts of the burly, business-suit clad agents on either side, a gag in his mouth and his arms behind his back. His eyes were furious, but red-rimmed and bloodshot in the flickering gold light. "What have you done to him?" Daniel demanded, uselessly trying to pull away from the pillar. "Charles, are you all right? Do you understand what's going on?"

He couldn't answer Daniel, but his eyes rolled briefly in his direction.

"Ah," Ethan said, appraisingly. "You did find yourselves a nice big one. Affirmative action hires from Angel, yet. I suppose even vampires have to change with the times."

Gunn wrenched forward furiously, almost pulling himself free, but then his knees buckled and his head dropped.

"Oh, let me guess," Ethan snorted in exasperation. He put his hand on the back of Gunn's neck and ran his fingers gently up his skull. "You've been hitting him, too. Is this really the way America trains all its so-called intelligence agents? Just cosh anything that moves?"

"Will he work or not?"

Ethan laid two fingers under Gunn's chin to check his pulse. Gun flinched at his touch but couldn't escape it. "Even concussed he's probably too strong, more likely to draw Dr. Jackson's life force instead of the other way around. But for the last time, don't --" Ethan held up a cautionary hand in response to a movement from one of Gunn's captors. "-- for pity's sake, _don't_ hit him again. Another whack on the noggin would probably kill him, and at any rate, there are far more humane ways to achieve our objectives." He wrapped his fist in the neckline of Gunn's T-shirt and dragged it down violently to bare his chest. "Do either of you gentlemen have a sharp knife?"

* * *

> When they went, they went upon their four sides; they turned not as they went, but to the place whither the head looked they followed it; they turned not as they went. And their whole body, and their backs, and their hands, and their wings, and the wheels, were full of eyes round about, even the wheels that they four had.
> 
> As for the wheels, it was cried unto them in my hearing, "O wheel."
> 
> Ezekiel 10: 11-13

_"It's just the ocean," Daniel Jackson had once told Jim, more naive, in some ways, even than Blair. "Just the waves beating against the cliff."_

Jim's senses were a curse in this landscape, where only the thinnest sea wall remained between the world and chaos. It was no wonder Blair had told him to be careful. A moment's inattention, allowing himself to follow too closely the sound of gravel grinding under a tire or a few lingering molecules of the bay rum aftershave worn by the man who'd shot Major Davis, and he'd be swept away by that ocean himself.

But he hadn't fallen, not yet. Teal'c kept his feet on the crumbling cliff-side path, just as he'd promised, even as the surf tore greedily at the land. Jim began to follow more quickly, and the flat, dead world flashed past his senses in a blur. Soon he could even hear Sandburg, fragmented, disjointed streaks of conversation, and eventually, he could tell what he was saying.

Blair was trying to comfort a dying man.

Jim allowed himself to listen for Paul Davis' heartbeat, but that was too close and at the same time, much too far away. The path crumbled underfoot and the sea surged towards him, but Teal'c bore him safely across.

Jim's eyes flickered open for an instant, and he looked at Teal'c.

His hands were on Jim's face as they had been from the beginning, thumbs at his cheekbones, forefingers tracing gentle circles at each temple. His touch was intimate, so sensual that Jim's body had begun to respond. His eyes slid shut as he reached for Blair's voice, but was guided by Teal'c hands. He could see Teal'c's dark fingers with his mind's eye. There were calluses on the heel of his right hand, and they rasped softly across the bristles under Jim's jaw in a time with the pulse of Jim's heart. Steadied, Jim was able to follow Blair's voice to the edge of the maelstrom, and Teal'c warm hands caught him back when he tried to go further.

"God," Jim muttered as his eyes opened again. "God." He was still leaning against a storefront wall just around the corner from the Indian restaurant. Major Carter stood anxiously at Teal'c's shoulder. The lights were still out but the moon had risen, so bright it blotted out the stars.

"You were successful," Teal'c announced.

"I found him," Jim said.

The center was so obvious now Jim wondered why he'd had to go searching in the first place. It was a yawning, reeking sinkhole opening across the innermost heart of reality. He was aware of Blair's bright flame flickering upon the edge for a timeless instant before being swallowed up like everything else, leaving nothing behind but the gravitational pull of the darkness.

"You know where they've taken Paul and Blair?" Major Carter asked, always wanting specifics. Jim supposed he didn't blame her.

"Yes," he answered, and made himself stand upright, shrugging away their offers of help. Grief had cauterized his other emotions. He didn't believe any longer that it would be possible to draw Blair back, but he wouldn't leave him alone there either. "I can get us there."

* * *

"You know this is completely insane," Wesley complained, helping Jack out of the car, then steadying him as he swayed. "Angel, would you please tell him? I mean, what do you plan to do if anyone _does_ come out the front door?"

"At least I can fall on them." Jack grabbed the top of the passenger-side door, waiting for his light-headedness to pass. He just needed a second here to catch his breath.

"The man sounds pretty determined," Angel said.

"It'd help if you could give me a weapon," Jack pointed out.

Wesley drew Jack's arm over his shoulders with a sigh. "We don't have any to spare."

"You've got wooden stakes."

"Those are human beings in there, not vampires."

"Some of 'em, maybe, but those NID guys? I wouldn't be laying odds on just how human any of them are."

"There's another crossbow in the trunk," Angel said. "That little one you built from a mail-order kit, remember?"

"Oh good heavens, do we really still have that?"

"Looks like it." Angel produced the weapon, gleaming black in the moonlight. "Only two bolts, though."

"It turned out rather well, actually," Wesley said, proud of himself. "The sight's just a tiny bit off, but as long as you're fairly close to your target you should be all right. Here." He left Jack propped against side of the car and set the crossbow on the ground to cock it, then swung it up to set the bolt in place. "You want to carry the other bolt?"

"I doubt I'll have time to reload."

"Probably not," Wesley agreed, disappointed. He handed Jack the crossbow before pulling Jack's left arm back over his shoulder. The weapon was a neat little thing, lightweight and only slightly longer than Jack's forearm. "The safety's right above the trigger there. Be sure you release it before --"

"I got it. Thanks."

"So we're ready to go here?" Angel interrupted with a touch of impatience. "Whatever they're trying to do in there, the sooner we stop it, the better."

"Yes, yes, I believe we're set to go," Wesley agreed. "We'll come in through the cellar, and Jack, you keep your head down until and in case anyone tries to get the hostages out through the front door."

"At which point I'll shoot my little bow and arrow," Jack said. "Then fall on everyone else. Got it."

Lights were flickering in the windows of the Hyperion's lobby. Jack thought he could see something rather oily, oozing and unnatural tainting the atmosphere around the Hyperion. The moon-cast shadows had blurred edges, and the faint breeze carried the scent of damp earth and salt. "If you're not ready to go through with this --" Wesley began irritably. Not a man used to command. In more leisurely circumstances, Jack would have wondered why Angel continued to defer to him.

"I'm ready," was all Jack said.

Simply getting across the street was the most difficult part of their plan. Traffic was lighter now, but also moving considerably faster, and cars weren't stopping for anyone. By the time they made their way to the Hyperion's front gates, Jack was feeling lightheaded again, his ankle joint grinding with pain. Angel said, "Just a minute," and darted through the iron gates into the open courtyard.

_He's a vampire,_ Jack couldn't help thinking as he watched Angel disappear. It was an utterly irrelevant concern in their current circumstances and he dismissed it, but some shiver of misgivings remained all the same, like a very small pebble in the toe of his boot. An instant later Angel was back, so swift and silent Jack wasn't aware of his return until he was at their side once more.

"Nobody's watching the front," he said.

"What are they doing?" Wesley demanded.

"I wasn't sure before, but that really is Ethan Rayne in there."

Ethan Rayne? Jack wondered.

"Dear God," Wesley murmured. "Giles thought Immigration had deported him months ago. Angel, you get Jack into position, and I'll meet you in back."

Angel nodded in quick agreement, and Jack's arm was shifted from Wesley's to Angel's shoulders. Angel was able to support far more of his weight, and he pulled Jack through the gate quickly, skirting the front door, and half carrying him to the wall near the overgrown pyracantha bushes. The moon was behind the roof line of the Hyperion, and Jack could see little more than the pale shape of Angel's face in the gloom.

"There. I don't think anyone coming in or out through the front will notice you unless you announce yourself."

"I'll be here if you need me," Jack said shortly. "Otherwise I'll stay out of the way until it's all over."

Angel made a noncommittal sound. "The big guys in the suits. They're   
armed?"

"SIGs. Practically standard issue."

"OK."

"Tell Wesley to be careful," Jack surprised himself by saying.

"I'll watch his back." Angel cut back across the outer courtyard, a shadow flitting briefly in the moonlight, then disappeared. The left side of Jack's body felt cold where Angel had been supporting his weight, but Jack didn't let himself think about that too much. He scooted along the wall, gritting his teeth as every crevasse between every flagstone jarred his ankle, and tried to get close enough to peek in one of the tall windows

Automobile headlights suddenly sliced through the front gates, strobing white, black, white as they flashed through the iron railings. Jack flattened himself against the wall, hoping to hide in the shadow of the pyracanthas. Car doors opened, and a voice Jack recognized was saying, "--a hospital, please. He's lost so much blood."

"That's exactly where we're going," someone else said flatly, not even trying to make the lie sound convincing. "And if you can't get him out, Dr. Sandburg, we'll do it ourselves."

A choked, angry, sound, and then Blair Sandburg staggered into the courtyard, supporting a bigger man who moved like he was on the verge of passing out. The glare of the headlights bled both men's profiles dead white, and the second man wasn't Ellison, as Jack had first supposed, but Major Paul Davis.

They'd been made right from the start, Jack thought, breathing shallowly to control his rage. His people must have been ambushed as soon as they landed in L.A. The NID had probably been watching and planning this before long before they ever left Colorado Springs. While Dr. Mackenzie had been trying to convince everyone that Daniel was going off the deep end, the damned NID had been taking notes.

Four agents escorted Blair and Davis into the hotel, and the headlights went out, leaving Jack blind in the darkness.

* * *

It took a while to find a knife. If he hadn't been so horrified and angry, Daniel would have been amused by the spectacle of all the beefy men in extremely well-cut suits patting down their pockets looking for a swiss army knife.

Then Ethan Rayne leaned forward and patted Daniel's own pockets and smiled into his face. "Still holding out on us, Dr. Jackson," he said, reaching in to retrieve Daniel's own little bone-handled pocket knife. "This should do nicely."

"At least tell me _why._"

"Why? I'd think that much would be obvious." Ethan opened the knife and tested the edge against his thumb. The knife had belonged to Daniel's father, and it made Daniel queasy with rage to see it in this lunatic's hands. "Could be a little sharper," Ethan complained. Then he shrugged. "You already know we're going to be inviting something very old and very, very big to wake up and use your body to manifest itself. Without reinforcements you'd burst like a lovely, ripe peach before this deity even got its big toe wedged into you. Psychically speaking. So I've made sure you have a few other lives handy, just to keep you in one piece for the duration of the summoning."

With that Ethan began to cut the buttons off Daniel's shirt.

Gunn again wrenched himself violently against his captors, useless as it was. His knees buckled, but he kept his head up, and above the gag his furious, bloodshot eyes were fixed on Daniel. He shook his head slightly when Daniel caught his eye. An apology, Daniel realized. As though this stubborn, hurt _child_ should have been able to prevent what was about to happen. He was reminded so powerfully of Skaara he could have wept.

"It won't be so bad," Ethan was saying. "You can just close your eyes and think of Old Glory. Or maybe Colonel Jack in your case." When the last button on Daniel's shirt went rolling away on the floor, Ethan used the knife to rip the front of his undershirt in two. "Ah, someone's been trying to read naughty books, hasn't he?" he exclaimed, gently tracing the outline of one of Wesley's signs on Daniel's belly. Daniel flinched violently from his touch. "So that's what this smudge on your forehead is. I just thought you'd been playing in the mud." He cupped his hand under Daniel's head and raised his chin. "Last chance, Dr. Jackson. Is there anything you'd like to tell me about the Ishakidu manuscript before we get started?"

"We'll all die if you go through with this," Daniel said, meeting his gaze steadily. "Everyone. Everywhere. You won't even get to be remembered as the greatest mass murder of all time because there won't be anyone left to remember. Why in the name of everything _human_ are you doing this?"

Ethan dropped his hand and shrugged. "When your military picked me up, they didn't exactly offer me a plenitude of choices. Either help them figure out why that crazy Dr. Daniel Jackson was so interested in the Dark Arts, or deportation to England. Frankly, this seemed like a lot more fun. Besides, just between you and me?" He leaned in very, very close and whispered in Daniel's ear. "As interesting as the disruptions the last two nights have been, I don't think this summoning has a chance in a million of actually working."

He stepped back quickly. "We've wasted enough time here. Are you gentlemen ready? Hold our friend very steady, please."

The agents holding Gunn tightened their grip as Ethan turned away from Daniel. "No," Daniel shouted, "Dammit, please don't do this."

"You know, I have quite a fondness for the Delta blues," Ethan told Gunn conversationally. "Does your generation even listen to the likes of Robert Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt anymore, or is it all rap and hip-hop these days? "

Gunn stood all but motionless, trembling with rage. "I only ask because, well, standing at the crossroads you know." He put his left hand on Gunn's chest, pushing away the remains of his shirt. "I believe you're sinking down." The knife flashed in the candlelight, and Gunn screamed into his gag. A long, serpentine line appeared across his chest, black with welling blood. "A start, anyway," Ethan said calmly. "You gentlemen will notice I'm taking care of Dr. Jackson's little charms first." He daubed at Gunn's wound with his fingertips, and then wiped wet blood on the sigils remaining on Daniel's chest and belly.

"Saliva would have worked just as well," he confided to Daniel. "But as you've probably already noticed, your intelligence community seems far more impressed with bloodshed."

* * *

> But I, Solomon, questioned him, saying: "If thou wouldst gain a respite, discourse to me about the things in heaven." And Beelzeboul said: "Hear, O king, if thou burn gum, and incense, and bulb of the sea, with nard and saffron, and light seven lamps in an earthquake, thou wilt firmly fix thy house. And if, being pure, thou light them at dawn in the sun alight, then wilt thou see the heavenly dragons, how they wind themselves along and drag the chariot of the sun."
> 
> Testament of Solomon (F. C. Conybeare translation, 1898)

"Do we have the CD player cued up?" Ethan asked. "Our actors in position? It's a shame we can't bring down the house lights."

"Ethan," Daniel pleaded, "Listen to me." Forcing the words out of his mouth was an effort. Ironically enough, with Wesley's protective charms gone Daniel could no longer see or hear the faceless prophet of the Revenuer's sleeping god, but then, he didn't need to. Its immanence was a crushing weight, as painful as the thin atmosphere on P3X-636 had been, and Daniel was sure no amount of time on an oxygen tank would clear his head this time around.

Come to think of it, the oxygen tank hadn't worked so well on '636 either.

"You're willing to destroy the planet - the entire _galaxy_ over an immigration dispute? Please, please think about this. If you know anything about me, you know I have friends in very high places. Whatever your problems are right now, I'm sure I can make them go away. Just give me a chance."

"I can't gag you once the play begins," Ethan answered conversationally. "But if you don't stop talking, I'm going to have one of these helpful agents use your own, regrettably dull knife to flay the skin off Mr. Gunn's right arm." He clamped his hand on Gunn's shoulder and smiled at Daniel. "Your choice."

Daniel started to speak anyway, and then snapped his jaws shut. He glared at Ethan, hearing himself panting a little with rage.

"Aha!" Ethan exclaimed. "You don't really believe it's going to work either, do you? I mean, if you really thought the fate of the universe was on the line, why would you let something as petty in the grand scheme as a little disfiguring torture silence you? So you might as well calm down, relax and enjoy it." He shrugged. "After all, it's not every day you get a walk-on role in a world premiere."

And then the front doors slammed open, and two men staggered in to immediately collapse in a heap.

"Some consideration for the performers, _please_?" Ethan snapped.

"I'm sorry for the interruption, Mr. Rayne." Agents followed the two men and dragged one of them back to his feet. "But we found Blair Sandburg."

"So you have," Ethan breathed. He quickly wiped his bloody fingers clean on Daniel's shirt and then marched across the lobby to extend his hand to Blair, who was struggling in the agents' grasp. "Dr. Sandburg," Ethan announced cheerfully. "Ethan Rayne. This is _quite_ an honor, sir."

Blair stopped fighting and stared at Ethan. His own face and hands were smeared with blood; it was even matted in his hair. "Help me," he said hoarsely.

"Of course," Ethan agreed immediately. "Anything you need. "

Blair Sandburg's eyes got bigger and rounder in the candlelight. He looked at the agents holding at him, and at a gesture from Ethan they let him go. At once Blair dropped back to his knees beside the man he'd helped in. "Paul's been shot. I don't know who you are or what you want with us, but he's going to bleed to death right here on your floor if we don't get him help right away."

"Dear heavens, certainly." Ethan knelt beside Blair and gently helped him lift Paul Davis' shoulders. One of the agents took his feet, another supported his legs, and together they carried him to one of the lobby sofas and carefully laid him down. From across the room Daniel couldn't tell how badly Paul was injured, but he seemed to be unconscious and his shirt was soaked in blood.

"We need towels to staunch the bleeding," Ethan said, the picture of concern. "And I want one of you to drive up to that clinic on Vine and see if they've got anyone who can help this poor man. Don't take no for an answer. Dr. Sandburg, if you'll go with these gentlemen here they'll get you cleaned up, find you something to calm your nerves. Brandy? Some warm milk? Cheese and biscuits, perhaps?"

"What?" Blair shook himself free from the agent who had taken his elbow. "I'm not leaving Paul with you. You -- you're the ones who shot him in the first place."

"You're confused," Ethan assured him smoothly. "You've been through a very traumatic experience, I understand, but you must see it's no help causing a fuss now and delaying his treatment."

"_I'm_ confused?" Blair sputtered, trying to back away from the loose circle of agents around him. His eyes were huge in the golden candlelight, hair tangled in his face. He spread his hands in front of himself, both palms black with Paul's blood. "Look, I'll do whatever you want, anything I can, I swear, but first you've got to help Paul."

"That's exactly what we're trying to do. Now please. The best way you can help your friend now is by accompanying these gentlemen and leaving us to do our job. "

A long moment passed. Blair hadn't noticed Daniel yet, or apparently much of anyone or anything else. As badly as Daniel wanted somehow to warn him, Ethan's casual threat to hurt Gunn kept him silent. Even if he could risk speaking, what good would it do to tell Blair to run? Ethan's NID thugs would catch him before he could take two steps.

Besides, it was obvious Blair didn't intend to abandon Major Davis.

Blair finally dropped his hands. "All right," he said miserably. "I'll do what you want, but please take care of Paul. He tried to help me. He doesn't deserve this."

One of the agents started to put his hand on Blair's shoulder, but at a quick head shake from Ethan stopped him. "We're all on the same side here, Dr. Sandburg."

Blair nodded dazedly and allowed himself to be led around the reception desk, but then he suddenly turned back. Ethan was still kneeling beside the sofa, ostentatiously pressing a handkerchief to Paul's chest. Blair turned away, unhappy but resigned, and then he finally spotted Daniel.

"Dr. Jackson?" he blurted out. "Daniel, is that you? Aw, jesus, man, do you know what's going on here? They've shot Major Davis." He started towards Daniel, pushing his way past one of the agents who tried to stop him. The agent yanked him back hard and Blair started to struggle, but Ethan was across the lobby in an instant, pushing the agent away and taking Blair's arm.

"You'll treat Dr. Sandburg with the respect to which he's due," he snapped. To Blair he said, "My apologies. I'm afraid these gentlemen are used to dealing with an entirely different class of individual."

"For god's sake, Daniel, " Blair begged, ignoring Ethan entirely. "What's going on here? Why are you --" He broke off and finally turned to look back at Ethan.

Daniel supposed Blair had finally seen the shackles in the candlelight, or perhaps noticed the state Gunn was in.

"No," Blair announced quietly, all trace of confusion gone. His voice carried through the lobby with odd clarity, and even Cordelia, who had been laughing rather shrilly from the inner courtyard, suddenly fell silent. "I'm not going anywhere with you. I'm taking Paul and Daniel, and we're all leaving right now."

"I won't try to stop you," Ethan assured him, and then nodded to the agent standing behind Blair. Daniel tried to shout a warning, but before the words were out of his mouth, the agent had clubbed Blair unconscious with the butt of his gun. Ethan caught him as he fell.

"I really didn't want to do that," he said, hoisting Blair's body awkwardly until the agent had stowed his weapon again and could take Blair from him. He slung Blair over his shoulders in a fireman's carry with a grunt, and Ethan made a show of brushing his palms together as though to wipe away a symbolic stain. "You know I abhor violence." He smiled. "Well, no, actually I don't, but it's so clumsy and in this case I sincerely wanted Dr. Sandburg to like me. We can only hope he won't remember any of this when he wakes up. Take him inside and get him some ice for his head, and have some aspirin ready, would you? Tell him he got that knock on his noggin while heroically saving Major Davis' life."

He looked at Daniel. "What?" he said. "You look like you disapprove. And here I am trying to address your very concerns. You're afraid that no one will be able to control the Tattered King, yes? That's precisely why I arranged to have Blair Sandburg present. You and me, we're just sorry followers of Enoch, you know, with our incantations and ancient ideograms and sacred squares. Dr. Sandburg's a natural. You think he ever spent months trying to figure out what the damn angels really said to John Dee? Bloody hell --" the very thought seemed to anger Ethan. "That boy probably just closes his eyes at night and goes strolling through the Green Lands."

Daniel was wondering dimly if it were possible for Ethan to sound any _more_ crazy.

"What's the matter now?" Ethan demanded. "Cat got your tongue?"

Daniel just looked at him.

"Oh, good lord. Is that it? Like I've really got time to flay anyone when we're already late getting started."

Daniel swallowed and then said quietly, "Dr. Sandburg's an anthropologist teaching at a mid-sized Washington State university. That's who he is. That's what he does. He has nothing to do with any of this."

"I know exactly who he is and what he does. The story is a Chopec shaman passed the Way along to him as a dying gift, but that sounds a little too fairy-tale even for my own, deeply romantic sensibilities. What isn't under dispute is the fact that as a graduate student Blair Sandburg was kidnapped by some amateur practitioners of the Art. Apparently they were threatening his lover Ellison, so Sandburg not only called up one of the Great Old Ones, but then successfully banished it again after every member of that cabal had been ripped to shreds. Amazing. Just amazing."

"That's the part that _isn't_ in dispute?"

"Half the Westchester neighborhood of Cascade was flattened in the   
process."

"I see," Daniel said. "You're telling me Dr. Sandburg caused the Cascade Earthquake."

"It's common knowledge. At least in some circles. Are you surprised I wanted to stay on his good side? If Dr. Sandburg has to banish the Tattered King, I'd prefer he didn't barbecue us in the process."

Insanity. Sheer insanity. "Please help Major Davis," Daniel asked.

"Speaking of Major Davis!" Ethan whirled. "Gentlemen, put Gunn on the back burner and use Davis first. Be a shame for such an upstanding officer to die on us before we even get a chance to use him."

"I've got a better idea," said Jack O'Neill. "Why don't you start by getting Daniel down from there instead?"

Daniel's head snapped up. Jack was standing on the threshold, holding one of the NID agents in front of him with a hand on the agent's shoulder. From the man's rigid posture, it was obvious Jack had a gun at his back.

"Colonel Jack," Ethan said calmly. He turned away, his lips curling in a brief, crooked smile. "You're just in time for the curtain. Cordelia, darling," he raised his voice. "Two minutes. Now Major Davis, if you please? It looks like he may have some trouble making it over here on his own."

The agent in Jack's grasp straightened a little, like a man preparing to meet his maker. After only the faintest of hesitations, two of the other agents pulled Paul Davis' limp form up from the sofa. He didn't even groan, and Daniel began to tremble.

Ethan wasn't going to stop, Daniel realized. He didn't care what Jack did to the agent he was holding hostage.

And Paul might already be dead.

"Leave him alone," Jack said in a cold, flat voice.

No one paid the slightest attention to him, and Daniel thought that was probably the most frightening thing that had happened all evening.

"By the way, this is more for our protection than for yours," Ethan explained as he fastened a blindfold over Daniel's face. "After the invocation, it really won't be safe for any of us to see what's looking out through your eyes."

"Get away from him," Jack said.

A weight fell against Daniel, pinning him to the pillar. "Dammit, no more warnings!" Jack threatened, and Daniel's heart twisted. The weight against him was hot and reeked of sweat and blood. He felt limp fingers pressed against his own pinioned hand.

Paul Davis was still alive. Hanging together like this from the same ring, Daniel could feel every thump of his heart. His head dropped onto Daniel's shoulder, and though Daniel tried to bear it, the unyielding weight against injured muscles and tendons simply hurt too much. He struggled a little, trying to shift Paul with his useless right hand, and Paul's head dropped back, his chest pressing harder against Daniel's as his weight shifted. Daniel could feel his blood between them, hot and wet, soaking his shirt and the waistband of his pants. Paul's breathing was painfully labored. Hanging here like this was probably killing him faster than the bullet in his chest.

Then Jack gave a sudden cry of anger or pain, and Ethan said, "A _crossbow_? What in the -- spread out, and check the back. Angel must be here somewhere."

"You might as well give it up now, you psychopath," Jack said, his voice tight. "The team from Edwards will be here any minute and you're all going to be spending the rest of your lives swabbing latrines in Leavenworth."

"You can't even stand up," Ethan remarked, sounding delighted. "And unless I'm very much mistaken, a vampire's been chewing on you this evening, too. The sheer nerve! No wonder Dr. Jackson is so smitten. I'm sure he's delighted that you're here to witness his debut."

"Jack--" Daniel said, though he knew he should hold his tongue. "Don't listen to him, Daniel," Jack called back immediately. "I'm fine. Have you and the Major down from there in two ticks."

"Yes, yes, of course," Ethan agreed happily. "You'll be interested in this music, Dr. Jackson. I've found that playing the work of certain composers during a performance of _The King in Yellow_ minimizes the unavoidable distortion of having Sumerian ideograms pronounced by English-speakers. Irving Berlin, for instance."

Cordelia began to recite stridently from the inner courtyard, "_What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o'clock that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Sylvia bent, half curiously, half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: 'To think that this is also a little ward of God!'?_"

And at that cue, the blat of brassy, big-band horn section exploded from speakers uncomfortably near Daniel's head.

Ethel Merman.

Singin' about a heatwave.

* * *

> "And then I could see the windows, where the trees were buzzing. Then the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says I have been asleep."
> 
> _The Sound and the Fury_ (Faulker: 1929)

_When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o'clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch._

Paul had no idea where he was or what was happening, except he had a pretty shrewd suspicion he was dying.

_It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire._

There was only a little pain, he couldn't see, and he had no recollection of the immediate past, so he had to admit he didn't have a whole lot of support for his terminal prognosis. Flashes kept coming though, even as he drifted, and he couldn't shake the sensation of having been underwater for so long that he wasn't even trying to breathe any longer.

_And then I was in time again, hearing the watch._

Paul had discovered a love of words relatively late in life. "Masterpieces of Literature," a required course he'd taken second year at the Academy, intended to teach him, per the course syllabus, "an appreciation for the culture he'd sworn to defend," and he supposed it had done that, though what he had really learned was his secret greed for words. The way they sounded in his mouth, the way they gave form to undifferentiated experience like a sculptor shaping clay.

Words for life.

Words for dying as well. And what words were tumbling around his head now? Hardly what he'd expected, or in his secret, immodest heart, hoped for. No laments for the fall of heroes, no Shakespeare or Tennyson, no rage against death, not Donne or Yeats, not even the austere acceptance of Emily Dickinson.

No, no, just his luck that he found himself lost in a lurid southern gothic, humid as a steam room, apparently channeling poor neurotic Quentin Compson on the last day of his life. At least it wasn't Benjy. _Caddy_, Paul thought, his mouth full of water that tasted like blood. It bubbled when he laughed a little. He couldn't deny it was more fitting than sitting on the ground and telling sad tales of the death of kings.

He could live with this. Or not. He laughed again, in resignation this time, and settled himself back for the end. The mausoleum of all hope and desire.

But then he felt a soft little hand, smaller than a child's, patting across his chest. Careful and slow, as though looking for a weakness. Paul tensed, trying to pull away, but there was nowhere to go when he didn't even know the boundaries of his own body anymore. The inevitable happened at last. The seeking fingers found the bullet hole in his chest, and slowly and oh-so-carefully began to push their way inside.

* * *

Kneeling on the floor with Wesley's loaded crossbow pressed to the back of his neck, Jack had to admit that perhaps this hadn't been one of his better-laid plans. In hindsight, it was clear he should have just shot the damned lunatic running the show the minute he came in the door, because there was no negotiating with someone willing to sacrifice his own people. But Wesley had warned him the crossbow sight was a bit off, and with that Ethan fellow standing barely a foot away from Daniel, Jack simply hadn't been able to take the risk. Besides, Angel and Wesley were supposed to be here any second. The point had been simply to provide a distraction until they arrived.

So where the hell were they?

Ethan was right. Jack was still dizzy from blood loss, and he had been using the agent he'd grabbed to hold himself upright. All the man had had to do was shift his weight, and Jack had come crashing down.

Goddammit.

His attempted distraction hadn't distracted anyone. Hadn't even slowed them down, but Paul Davis was a loyal friend and a damned fine officer, and watching him hauled around like a sack of potatoes while he bled to death and doing nothing to stop it was simply unacceptable. Daniel looked like death warmed over (what the hell had they been doing to him?) and what's more, if Daniel had been right about what these people were planning, the rest of the galaxy didn't have much time left.

Especially once the music started.

Jack's heart lurched in his chest. _Christ._ It couldn't be chance that he'd been hearing "Heat Wave" in his dreams since this whole thing began. He tried to get up, no longer caring about the cocked weapon at his back, but the agent kicked him viciously and Jack went sprawling across marble floor. The bright, sharp stutter of pain brought a momentary return of sanity. Jack shook a little at how close that had been. Nothing but dumb luck that he had a bootprint over his kidneys right now instead of an arrow through his back, but how could anyone keep still when the universe was about to start unraveling at the seams?

The floor beneath his cheek suddenly felt as cold as glacier ice. In contrast, the air was so humid and still Jack was suddenly and powerfully reminded of a long-ago summer at Barksdale AFB. Shreveport, Louisiana. God. Hadn't thought about that place in years. Ninety degrees in the shade, ninety percent humidity. Like living in a terrarium.

"It was 1991," he told Daniel, shifting closer and nuzzling the back of his neck. "End of the cold war. Grown men wept when they ripped the wings off those B52s and left 'em sitting there in the Boneyard for the Russian satellites to see. "

"Jack," Daniel complained sleepily, his voice muffled by the pillow. "Tell me you're not getting sentimental over bombers."

"B52 BUFFs. Know what 'BUFF' stands for?"

"Bet you're gonna tell me," Daniel mumbled.

"Big Ugly Fat Fellow." Jack smiled against Daniel's warm skin. "That's what. Hell of a name for those old warriors who finally brought down the Evil Empire."

Daniel stretched luxuriously against Jack and then snuggled back down with his pillow. "Uh-huh. And the collapse of the Soviet economy had nothing to do with it. What was the point of that last forty years again?"

"Makin' sure that spoiled little pinko archaeologists like you can sleep safe in their beds at night," Jack said, and leaned up to kiss his ear while Daniel squirmed away with a gasp of laughter.

"For the sake of my sanity, I'm just going to pretend I did _not_ hear that," he declared, laughing too hard for his outrage to be very convincing. Then Jack heard a flurry of dull pops like champagne corks being pulled, and the foolish little fantasy was gone as quickly and irrationally as it had come, leaving Jack was still sprawled on the marble floor as a lunatic undid the world.

The boundaries were getting so thin, and those had been gunshots coming from the back of the hotel. Dammit, Angel, Jack though, allowing himself an instant to grieve. _You said you'd watch out for Wesley._

The atmosphere was more dense than ever, and Jack had to concentrate hard to keep from drifting away again. What he had mistaken for heat and humidity was really pressure so tremendous it warped everything around it. Sound itself grew fat, Ethel Merman's voice becoming deeper and deeper, grinding down until the music sounded like the roaring of a beast. Jack craned his head around, fighting the inertia and lethargy that urged him to just lie still and give in. He was trying to see Daniel and Paul, but the candlelight bent around them, weighted by the mass of unimaginable immanence pressing against realty. Jack could see only the back of the pillar where they hung, and the granite-tiled pillar itself was curved like a bow.

From the center of the distortion came a wild, vast shriek like the death throes of a universe, but as it whirled out it climbed higher and higher until it reached a nearly human register, and Jack realized he was listening to Daniel scream. He tried to crawl forward, thinking that if he could just get a little closer he could fall into that event horizon and somehow reach him, but everything had already changed. All at once Jack could breathe again. The pillar stood perpendicular to the wall and floor. Paul and Daniel both hung from the embedded ring, swaying slightly, and Daniel had gone silent.

> _Gee her anatomy  
> Makes the mercury  
> Jump to ninety-three  
> Yes, sir!_

"Daniel," Jack breathed. The floor underneath was still icy cold, but the atmosphere was only sticky, thick and hot as Shreveport after a thunderstorm late in the day. Whatever had been about to happen .... well, it wasn't happening now. Everything around him was still freighted and fragile with possibility, though. A sneeze at the wrong moment might shatter galaxies.

A voice Jack didn't recognize was declaiming seriously, _There was not a soul in the park as I passed among the trees and took the walk which leads from the Garibaldi statue to the Hamilton Apartment House, but as I passed the churchyard I saw a figure sitting on the stone steps._

_That's it!_ answered another voice, one Jack recognized. There was the faintest stutter as Cordelia began, but she regained control quickly. _That's it! Swear and act silly and ruin your brushes! You have been three weeks on that study, and now look! What's the good of ripping the canvas? What creatures artists are!_

"You'll want to cut him down quickly," Ethan Rayne said. Behind him, the voices of the players and the music from the CD were blending together once more into an impossible, undifferentiated whole, like the chanting of a thousand soft voices or the hum of cicadas on a hot summer night. "We can't lose our momentum now."

No one moved. The cicadas droned.

"Major Davis died sooner than we thought, that's all," Ethan urged silkily. "You felt what was happening. Do you think the goa'uld will be able to survive _that_? Bring Mr. Gunn."

"Forget the goa'uld," Jack croaked, dimly surprised that he could speak at all. "Do you honestly think humanity will survive?"

Ethan turned slowly and smiled down at Jack. "No," he said. "I believe we'll use the Colonel instead."

That finally seemed to stir the NID agents to action. Jack was yanked unceremoniously to his feet and dragged towards the column, where an agent just on the verge of releasing the plastic cuffs around Paul's wrists stopped and laid two fingers against the side of his throat.

"Mr. Rayne," he said, and his voice shook. "I'm afraid we've got a   
problem."

"What do you mean?" Ethan snapped.

"I mean he's not dead."

As if on cue, Paul turned his head a bit and opened his eyes. "Colonel O'Neill?" he mumbled. He sounded groggy and confused, but a damned far cry from dead. "I don't know where Dr. Sandburg is." He managed to raise his head for a moment. "My ... responsibility, sir."

"It's all right, Major," Jack told him helplessly. Daniel hung motionless behind him, and with the blindfold over his eyes, it was impossible to tell if he were even conscious. If it weren't for his stentorian breaths, Jack would have been afraid that Daniel was the one who had died here after all.

"By what possible stretch of the imagination is any of this _all right_?" Ethan snapped. It was the first time Jack had heard him sound flustered. "Hurry up and get him down. Am I the only person who's noticed we're in the middle of an invocation here?"

The agent released the plastic cuffs, and Paul dropped like a stone. "Damn you--" Jack growled as Ethan proceeded to shove Paul out of the way with his foot. "Why don't you try picking on someone who doesn't have a bullet in his chest for a change?"

Paul groaned, but couldn't rise on his own. Ethan paid no attention to either of them. "Did you see that?" he demanded of the agents. Jack noticed the perfect thrum of cicadas had begun to splinter. He could hear random notes from the horn section behind Ethel Merman, and an occasional strident syllable or two from the actors out in the courtyard. "One of you shine a flashlight down here."

A moment of fumbling, and then a harsh circle of light splashed across the floor. "Over here," Ethan said. Something caught the light on the marble tiles, and Ethan swooped down and snatched it up. He clutched the small object in his fist, shaking.

"Jackson," he whispered, muttering the name like a curse, before springing up and holding his prize out for Jack's inspection. Between his thumb and forefinger was a squashed, deformed bit of metal.

"Guess I'm in luck," Ethan hissed bitterly. "Obviously there's no longer a bullet in Major Davis' chest after all, is there?"

> _The way that she moves  
> that thermometer proves  
> that she certainly can can-can_

_I can't see his face, but he does look fat and soft,_ Cordelia recited woodenly. _Someway or other he reminds me of a dream, an awful dream I once had. Or, was it a dream after all?_

Jack's arms were yanked over his head, his hands secured next to Daniel's one bound hand. He could feel Daniel's chest rising against his own. "Normally such stubbornness is a trait I admire," Ethan said, "but not when it threatens the hard work of so many good people. After all, they've been rehearsing for weeks." He smiled at Jack, regaining, with obvious effort, some trace of his appalling good humor. "The play's the thing --" he tossed the remains of the bullet over his shoulder and waved a pocket knife in front of Jack's face. "--wherein I'll smash the conscience of the king."

He opened the blade and stabbed Jack in the side. Steel rang on bone and Jack shouted aloud, his knees buckling. He sagged hard against Daniel, gritting his teeth and trying not to scream again.

Daniel's head dropped back lifelessly.

"We're going to do it right this time," Ethan explained, but the strain was telling on him, and he couldn't quite recapture his former confident tone. "So when you feel the Tattered King getting close and the walls coming down, I'd like for you to make sure Daniel takes what he needs from _you_, and not the other way around."

Ethan's voice was becoming slower and deeper, like a 45 record being played at 33 rpm. Jack didn't know if it was the whole world tearing itself apart, or just his own body going into shock. "Because frankly, I'm sure Dr. Jackson doesn't have a whole lot left at this point. If you allow him to expend his own life force for you the way he did for Major Davis, he'll die as certainly as if you'd put this little knife through his heart yourself."

Ethel Merman's anything-but-plaintive "Won't you play a simple melody?" was merging smoothly once more into the voices of the actors. Cicadas on a hot summer night, everything, everyone, and Jack was slipping so fast, even as he fought to hold on.

Ethan's voice had dropped so low it rumbled like an earthquake, rattling the entire building.

_I trust we understand each other... Colonel...._

And then the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, though Jack was sure he wasn't sleeping.

* * *

  


> The gallows from which he is suspended forms a Tau cross, while the figure--from the position of the legs--forms a fylfot cross. There is a nimbus about the head of the seeming martyr. It should be noted (1) that the tree of sacrifice is living wood, with leaves thereon; (2) that the face expresses deep entrancement, not suffering; (3) that the figure, as a whole, suggests life in suspension, but life and not death. It is a card of profound significance, but all the significance is veiled.
> 
> The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (Waite: 1911)

Angel knew about the ambush before it happened, but it didn't do them much good in the end.

He and Wesley got into the basement through the coal chute into the sub-basement. Angel had kept meaning to get that door welded shut, but it had been pretty far down on his to-do list. The iron latch was orange with some fifty years of accumulated rust, and it would have taken a crowbar and superhuman strength to budge it anyway.

Angel didn't happen to have a crowbar with him this evening, so it was taking him a few minutes to get through.

Wesley hovered at his back, half-frantic with impatience. "We've got to stop Ethan before he finishes whatever he's trying to do in there. Obviously he's gotten hold of a spell of tremendous power. He could flatten the whole city."

"Or worse," Angel said.

"Yes, yes, it could be even worse. Can't you go any faster?"

"Now that you mention it, I suppose I could get to work instead of just dawdling around around here," Angel growled as a shower of rust sprinkled down over both hands. He could feel iron beginning to slip against iron, but the angle was awkward, and he couldn't manage a good grip.

"Perhaps we should go in through the loading dock behind the kitchen. Or up the fire escape."

"They have to be expecting someone to try that. We can't do any good if we get shot before we even --" the bolt under Angel's hands gave a shriek of protest and suddenly slid free. He kicked the rusted iron door and it swung open with bang. Angel knelt down and stuck his head in, listening, then wriggled through the low opening and dropped to the floor. Wesley followed him, and then they both paused for another moment, Angel listening for sounds of movement upstairs, Welsey to lay his hand on Angel's forearm for guidance. It blacker than pitch down here.

"Something's going on," Angel muttered. Wesley forebore to point out they already knew that much. "I can feel it on my skin, like ants crawling, and I can -- " he broke off.

"You can what?"

Silence.

"Angel? You can what?"

"I can feel it -- tugging at me." Angel confessed. "I've, uh, been involved in an apocalyptic plan or two myself. You know, back in the day. It's kind of .... It's kind of hot."

"And _that's_ why vampires are so interested in end-of-the-world schemes? Are you telling me it's all in the gonads?"

"Look, could we not talk about this right now? Careful. The stairs start here."

"Got it." Wesley slid his hand to Angel's shoulder and followed him cautiously up. Water dripped. The drain Angel used to access the city's sewer lines was somewhere beneath them, and the staircase seemed longer and steeper than Wesley remembered. He could attribute some of it to the strangeness of ascending in total darkness, but the rest might be due to Ethan's magic. Close proximity to powerful spells did cause notable physiological effects, in addition to the psychological ones.

Wesley had never confessed to anyone that magic tended to give him indigestion. He had a hell of a stomach ache right now.

"OK," Angel said at last, stopping. "I can hear them, but they're still two flights above us."

"Coming down?"

"I'm not sure. I don't think so."

"Waiting for us, then."

"Probably. "

"We have the advantage," Wesley decided. "Let's get up there and stop this thing now."

Angel didn't answer, but Wesley could hear the squeak of hinges and felt a soft wind of musty air as Angel pushed open the door. Fifty years after the last bottle had been stored in this cellar, the walls still held the faint scent of spilt wine. "Careful," Angel whispered then, and wrapped his cold hand around Wesley's forearm to keep him from tripping on the threshold. "I was right. They're behind the door at the head of stairs. Two, maybe three of them. No more than that."

"That's their mistake," Wesley breathed back.

"I can get up there and take them out before they even know what hit them."

"Not alone. They're armed."

"Just with guns."

"You think Ethan hasn't warned them about you? Who knows they're packing?"

"Not up for a vote here, Wesley." Angel stepped away to make his point, and even Wesley had to admit it was a pretty good one. In the complete dark he was helpless. Damn Angel anyway.

And then the floor rolled beneath their feet as reality began to swing off its hinges. Light exploded from above like a bomb blast, the percussive force knocking Welsey to the ground. He felt the rotation of the earth as the planet wheeled crazily around the sun, and when the spots faded from his eyes he was straddling Angel and holding a stake to his heart.

"What are you waiting for, Wes?" Angel purred up to him, and then smiled dreadfully. Wesley would have preferred anything, even his game face, to that expression. "Don't you know all it takes is one good--_hard_\--shove?" He bucked from the hips, in case Wesley didn't get it.

Where were they now? Wesley was desperately fighting all the evidence of his senses. What was happening? A diffuse orange light surrounded them, and he thought he could hear traffic sounds in the distance. Angel lay flat on his back on asphalt pavement, and little bits of gravel were digging into Wesley's knees through his jeans. Those hulking shapes in the near distance could have been parked cars. A parking lot in downtown L.A., maybe. Locked up, after hours. Why in the world were they _here_?"

And what had caused Angel to turn?

"Ever get invited to the Watcher's Feast, Wes?" Angel asked cheerfully. Angel was wrapped in heavy iron chains, Wesley realized then, encircling him from his shoulders down to his knees. It had to be the only reason Angel hadn't swatted him away yet.

"The Feast is a myth," Wesley snapped. "A bedtime story to scare vampires."

"Oh really? Is that why they still train the surgeons? Or are you just disappointed they booted you out before you got a chance to share?"

"You're talking nonsense."

"I admit I admire the skill involved," Angel continued conversationally. "Carving out a living vampire's heart like sashimi. In the old days, I understand they used to take the sexual organs first. That's what they're going to do with me, you know. Unless you spoil their fun by killing me   
first."

"It's not going to happen," Wesley snapped. He still held the wooden stake at Angel's breast, the point making a slight indention in the blue silk shirt. "Be quiet and let me think." He couldn't turn Angel over to the Watchers, that was a given, but he was far too dangerous to be allowed to roam free. He had to find Gunn and Cordelia, and together they could figure something out.

"I'll tell them everything," Angel said. "How scared you are before a fight. I can always hear your heart going a mile a minute. I'll tell them the rest, too. What you did after I chopped off Cordy's head and put a sword through Gunn."

No. It hadn't happened that way. That had all been just some kind of terrible dream.

"Such fresh kills their blood hadn't even begun to coagulate, but you, you still got hard as soon as I started to feed."

"Shut up." Wesley's face was burning even though it wasn't true, _none_ of it was true. Both his palms were wrapped around the smooth haft of the stake.

"You smelled so sweet down there." Angel closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. "Wet and eager as a schoolgirl."

Wesley leaned down over Angel, putting pressure on the stake. His own voice sounded strange. "You'll have to forgive me for not having recognized a romantic overture." In the back of his mind, Wesley wondered how on earth he had survived, if the attack he remembered had really happened. Angel had stripped him there on the floor of the Hyperion's lobby and proceeded to gnaw his way through Wesley's inner thigh to the femoral artery. He should have been dead a dozen times over.

Angel showed his square, human teeth in a smile. "You'll cry before I'm done with you."

"Maybe," Wesley admitted. "But it won't change anything. And I won't stop trying to help. You're the one who taught me that."

Angel's face wrenched grotesquely, the change so fast Wesley didn't see it happen, even though he was staring straight at him. Angel sat bolt upright, the chains on his body flying outwards in all directions like the snakes on Medusa's head, and he uttered a guttural, hungry roar as his fangs snapped at Wesley's neck. Wesley had nothing but the stake, so he lunged into the attack, bracing his only weapon and praying the angle of insertion would miss Angel's heart. Pavement was surging beneath them and the night was full of stars, but Welsey's world had narrowed itself down to the firm resistance of silk and flesh, and then the quick, final sundering as both finally tore under the pressure of the polished wooden point.

* * *

There was a sharp jolt as Major Carter pulled the rental car off the side of the road, and for a single innocent moment, Jim thought she had simply hit the curb. Then he felt a shuddering rumble as the seawall crumbled inwards, and the first icy cold waves began began lapping at his feet. "This is not real," he said quietly and firmly. He stretched out his hand, found the handle on the car door, and carefully got out, all the while grounding himself in the small, ordinary things. The tan vinyl padding on the inside of the rental car door. The buckled sidewalk and the crushed purple jacaranda blossoms scattered across it. He looked back to Carter and Teal'c , both pulling themselves out of the car as well. They seemed dazed, so Jim said, "You don't have to believe it. Just pretend it's the ocean."

Teal'c pushed on one stubborn step and fell to his knees. Carter was beside him, arms outstretched as though she were blind, moving in shuffling, uncertain steps. Jim tried to take her hand, but his fingers passed right through hers, and for an instant he saw what she saw.

_Ruins stretched to the horizon under a sickly reddish sky. The very air smelled dead, and he couldn't breathe in enough to fill his lungs. There were monsters carved on the sides of the vast, broken stones, and when Jim turned his head dazedly, they danced under a shrunken and dying sun._

Jim wrenched himself away from her and was back in an alley in Hollywood right behind the Hyperion Hotel. Madness poured like seawater from the very windows and doors of the place. A fatal arrhythmia had seized the heart of existence, and everything that _was_ stuttered and began to fall away from the center. Jim experienced it like a dreadful pain in his own chest, but he pressed forward all the same. He didn't allow himself to believe that he was really dying -- it was all just a cosmic metaphor, it had to be. Reducing the ineffable and un-graspable to something easy and unshifting. Bright primary colors and smooth wooden blocks.

No different from controlling pain with an imaginary dial or seeing the final, entropic decay of the universe as a restless sea eating away at the land.

Blair was in there somewhere, so close to the unraveling center.

Jim managed another step forward. His heart beat like the clanging of a gong, and the rushing surf tore at him. He lost his footing for an instant and found himself in Blair's office on the first floor of Hargrove Hall. Quite a step up from a desk and a couple of file cabinets in the artifact storage room. Blair pretended the move wasn't a big deal, but in reality he'd been so proud ...

Alex Barnes hadn't bothered to herd him outside to the fountain. She had simply shot him at point blank range, one bullet to the chest, the other to the temple, probably after he'd already slumped down over his desk. Jim could see powder burns on the scattered student papers.

He thought, in that first instant, that he would go mad with grief, and then he thought he already _had_, because he didn't rush forward, didn't pull Blair into his arms, didn't voice a word of denial. He only backed up carefully to preserve the crime scene. Simon wouldn't let him investigate this, even though he was the first on the scene and by rights should have been lead detective. He thought he probably wouldn't even fight Simon too hard over the issue.

He hit the wall behind him and slid down to the floor. Funny how his legs wouldn't hold him up anymore. He could feel his throat working, but no words escaped. Maybe he was just trying to keep breathing, and he wondered why he bothered. Every heartbeat tore at him.

Every heartbeat _rang_.

At that realization he forced his head above the sea water, even though grief was lead in his shoes, and once more he was behind the Hyperion, this time sprawled on the uneven sidewalk. He had smashed jacarantha blossoms smeared on the palms of both hands, and no doubt on the seat of his pants as well. Everything was still in flux, but if he weighed every movement, every thought, he could navigate between the streams.

He was still crying, but he didn't dare squander enough concentration to wipe his streaming eyes.

* * *

Then it was over. An older, more familiar reality settled into place, perhaps less easily than before. The worn oak floor of the old wine cellar was smooth under his cheekbone. Angel wasn't screaming anymore, but he groaned with every breath.

"Angel!" Wesley whispered, sitting up fast and feeling around as he tried frantically to reach him. "Dammit, Angel, where are you?"

Angel's hand found his in the darkness, clamping hard around Wesley's wrist and yanking him down again. "Quiet," he breathed, gasping and fighting to stifle his own moans. "They could still be up there."

"What's wrong?" Wesley demanded, but he tried to keep his voice down. He freed his hand and felt across Angel's chest, looking for the stake he was afraid he had really plunged into his chest or belly. Angel's shirt was sticky, and there was a metallic smell in the air. "You're bleeding. God, Angel--"

"Are you all right?" Angel interrupted, a sharp edge despite how quiet he was trying to be. "They didn't hit you?"

Wesley finally got it. The bright lights, the explosion of sound just before that nightmare in the orange-litten parking lot -- the men waiting for them upstairs must have flung the door open and fired down just as the world turned sideways.

"I'm all right," he told Angel. "Let's get out of the line of fire."

He touched Angel's face and felt him nodding his head. Then he got carefully to his feet, crouched over double so he could get his hands under Angel's shoulders. He moaned as Wesley began to drag him, his back arching, but he made no other sound until Wesley backed into a cellar wall and stopped, sliding to the floor and holding Angel upright against himself. Angel gasped out a long, quiet sound, as though he'd been holding his breath from the pain the whole way.

"We're around the corner from the stairs now, right? If they want us they'll have to come down and get us." The darkness was completely enveloping, a dark blanket thrown over their heads.

"I think so," Angel agreed weakly.

"How many bullets?"

"In me?" A grunt of something like laughter. "Redundant after the first three or four."

"I didn't even know what was happening." While all Wesley had known was the tilt and whirl of an unstable universe, Angel must have held onto enough awareness to cover Wesley's body with his own. "Angel --"

He wouldn't let Wesley say it. "Lucky for us they panicked when everything went off the rails. Oh, _dammit_." His back arched again, taut as a bow before he collapsed wearily against Wesley again. "If they'd been able to hold out, they would have come down here and finished us off."

"Cowards," Wesley said. A little bravado couldn't hurt.

"Must've thought it was good enough for government work," Angel said, and started to chuckle, but he broke off with a groan.

Wesley ran his hand down Angel's arm and laid his palm against the back of Angel's right hand, interlacing their fingers tightly. "Wherever these glimpses are coming from," he said, "That ugly, desperate place we see when it all goes to hell. It's not me. You hear me, Angel? And it's not you either."

Angel had begun panting harshly from the pain. "Such -- a -- _child,_" he groaned. "Think by now you'd start to grow up but --"

"We can discuss my naïveté later," Wesley said. "Are they still up there?"

"Hard to tell. Too far away, and I can't --" Angel shuddered again, agony robbing him of speech.

"I'm going up, then," Wesley decided.

"Don't be an idiot. You can't take on the NID by yourself."

"I'll be back for you as soon as I've taken care of Ethan. His men think we're dead, so I'll have the element of surprise. Besides, Angel, all I really have to do is disrupt his spell. How hard can it be?"

"Do you really want me to answer that?"

"No." Wesley eased himself free of Angel,settling him carefully against the wall. "I'll be back as soon as I can. " He found his flashlight and turned it on for the first time, squeezing his eyes shut against the glare. He opened his eyes slowly again to let them adjust, but he didn't look towards Angel as he did. Knowing how badly he was hurt would just make it harder to leave him.

* * *

It took a ridiculously long time to find the room. Jack stormed up and down the long dark corridor, key clutched in his hand, double checking the room numbers and trying to figure out if the odd-numbered rooms were on the right or left side, and whether the numbers were ascending or descending towards the elevator.

Really, it should not have been this hard.

He kept forgetting the number, though, and for some reason he hated looking down at the key to remind himself. Far better to simply squint at the door plates and hope that one would eventually jog his memory. When he finally did look down at the key clutched in his sweaty palm, though, the number on it meant nothing to him, except to startle him into wondering whether he were even looking on the right floor, a possibility that for some reason made him dizzy and a little sick with nameless and inexplicable apprehension.

He was just on the verge of doing something really stupid -- screaming, say, or maybe even bursting into tears -- when he finally found himself in front of room 636. Well, hell. It had been right here all along -- _he_ had been right here all along. Ridiculous how a building like this could put such lunatic notions in his head. Anyone would think Jack O'Neill hadn't spent the past few years gate hopping to places way, _way_ crazier than a fancy old hotel.

There was a limit to how much he could lie to himself, though. Jack knew his hands were still shaking as he clumsily fit the key into the lock and finally, finally managed to open the door. He hastily locked it behind himself and flipped the deadbolt before turning around with a sigh of relief.

Daniel had already gone to bed. He lay on his side with his back to Jack, the covers pulled up over his shoulder. The bedside lamp was still on, and a small book with a yellow cover lay on the table.

Jack shed his clothes and left them piled neatly on the sofa in the suite's little sitting room area, then lifted the covers and slid into bed. Daniel shifted back without awakening, though a contended little moan escaped his parted lips. Jack sighed too, spooning around Daniel, and allowed his eyes to close. With Daniel's warm weight in his arms, he felt as though he could sleep forever.

* * *

> They say that the first inhabitants of the earth, glorying in their own strength and size, and despising the gods, undertook to raise a tower whose top should reach the sky, in the place in which Babylon now stands: but when it approached the heaven, the winds assisted the gods, and overthrew the work upon its contrivers.
> 
> _Euseb_. Pr?pe Evan. lib. 9.-Syncel. Chron. 44.-_Euseb_. Chron. 13.

She wouldn't let him. That's all there was to it. Teal'c had not allowed Daniel to die by Amaunet's hand, the Colonel hadn't let Daniel fall from his own balcony, and Sam wasn't going to let him plunge into the abyss now. She owed it to Teal'c and Jack. She owed it to _Daniel_, damnit, so she kept running even through her lungs burned for oxygen and her muscles screamed in exhaustion. Her head felt ready to explode. Maybe it already had, because blood streamed from her nose, crusting her lips, and sour at the back of her throat. Her vision was blurred from the stinging sweat in her eyes, but she could still see Daniel as a pale reverse shadow. There was no horizon beyond him. She was too close and the temple was too vast for her to see the columns or the pediment. There was nothing but a darkness more tremendous than the space between galaxies.

She felt as though she'd been chasing Daniel for hours, but lacking any frame of reference, she had no idea how close they might be to that fathomless threshold by now. She prayed that it was still miles away. Daniel was still running hell for leather, irresistibly summoned by the sleeper in the   
darkness.

From somewhere she found the strength for a new burst of speed. She heard Teal'c and the Colonel shouting at her from behind, and she tried to call to Daniel as well. Only a wheezing kind of gasp escaped her, but miraculously, it was enough. Daniel slowed, turned around and stopped so suddenly she all but bowled him over. He touched her shoulder to steady her, and Sam nodded in relief. She bent at the waist, hands on her knees, too winded to speak.

"Easy," Daniel was saying gently, as though he hadn't just led them all on an insane foot race across this god-haunted plain. "Just catch your breath."

"Daniel," she panted, the blood roaring in her ears. The Colonel was still shouting somewhere behind her. "Aw, damnit, Daniel, you scared me to death."

"I'm sorry, but I didn't know what else to do," he told her gravely. Why wasn't he as winded as she was? "It's not like it even knows we're here. We might as well be, I don't know, a couple of paramecium trying to catch the attention of an elephant."

"Horton hears a Who?" Sam suggested, and Daniel cracked an honest-to-goodness smile for her.

"Yeah. Maybe."

Then he took a step backwards and crossed the temple threshold.

She screamed his name as he folded inward like a sheet of origami paper, the outlines of his body disappearing into impossible angles. In the space of seconds, nothing was left but a tiny, intricate shimmer against the darkness.

Then the universe hiccuped, and P3X-636 disappeared the same way Daniel   
had.

"Oh, damn." She stumbled, almost falling, but Teal'c caught her as he staggered upright himself. "Oh, _damn._" She swiped angrily at her streaming eyes.

"I grow weary of these hallucinations as well," Teal'c assured her, growling a little. "They cannot be allowed to continue." The night was loud and dark around them. People were shouting in the distance and traffic had stopped once again, sirens and car alarms blaring anew. On the far side of the road a car had somehow tipped on its side, half-way up the sidewalk, and its headlights threw a skewed beam of light across the pavement and through the front gates of the Hyperion. The asphalt and cement showed ripples and cracks like the aftermath of an earthquake. Sam pointed to the damage.

"It's hard for me to believe any human agency could be responsible for this," she said, even though the Colonel had seemed so sure on the phone. "Where's Detective Ellison?"

Teal'c turned around slowly. "We were in the car," he said. "And then we were attempting to intercept Daniel Jackson before he entered the structure on P3X-636. I do not remember anything else."

"We got separated the last time, too," Sam said unhappily. Jim Ellison could be anywhere, and their first priority had to be getting inside the Hyperion Hotel. "We'll find him once we've ascertained what's happening in there."

Candlelight twinkled in the ground floor windows of the big hotel. Shadows moved, and Sam could hear strains of music that made the hair stand up on her arms. She knew Teal'c didn't like her decision, but he nodded and, at her signal, slipped through the front gates and flattened himself beside one of the ground floor windows. Sam checked over her shoulder and then followed. The headlights from the overturned car threw monstrous, crazy-limbed shadows of herself across the front of the building as she ran.

She took up a position on the far side of the same window, then cautiously turned her head and peered in. She stared at the tableau inside until a cold wind touched her face, and then she abruptly turned away, sliding down the wall until she was squatting on her haunches.

Well, hell.

The candlelight within hid more than it revealed, but she had seen at least a dozen people in the lobby, probably more. The shadows were more substantial than the moving figures, and she had no way to distinguish friend from foe. She could feel Teal'c watching her for her next decision, imagine the raised eyebrow she couldn't actually see in the darkness. Her heart was pounding as though she had been running a great distance (as though she really had been chasing Daniel across the plains of '636) and she wondered how she could have mistaken the sound coming from lobby for _music_. In truth, it was as inhuman as whale song.

Sam took a deep breath, turned and knelt up a little, forcing herself to look again.

The lobby was still full of shadows, but they seemed glossy and sharp-edged now, like monoliths of smoked glass. For an instant, at least, Sam could see around their edges. Jack hung in the center of the room with his arms dragged high above his head. She couldn't see how he was suspended or whether his feet touched the floor, and a man Sam didn't know stood beside him, holding something that flashed candlelight.

The light in the stranger's hand suddenly resolved itself into a blade, and he thrust it, smiling, into Jack's side.

* * *

No one seemed to be paying any attention to him, least of all that lunatic who kept rambling on to Colonel O'Neill.

That was a good thing.

Moving as steadily and slowly as he could, Paul dragged himself forward a few more inches and then stopped again, trying to keep from panting out loud, waiting to see if anyone would try to stop him. His chest ached with a dull, constant pain, and he felt weak as a kitten, but he was pretty sure he wasn't dying anymore, and that gave him the irrational but unshakable conviction that he would be able to stop this.

He managed a few more inches on his elbows and then lay flat again. The way his pulse roared in his ears, he half-thought the pounding of his heart would give him away. But no one seemed to take any notice. So strange (though Paul wasn't complaining), because on the one hand everything seemed so still and quiet Paul couldn't imagine how the awkward spectacle of him hunching and inching himself across the floor could possibly go unnoticed. On the other hand, the quiet also seemed like the peace at the eye of a hurricane, and a damn elephant or two galumphing through the lobby would probably go unnoticed in this chaos. Music and voices howled around him, sometimes falling into discrete elements but more often blending into a roar like the fury of a storm.

Colonel O'Neill suddenly cried out.

Paul froze. The Brit talked on liked he hadn't even noticed. Paul's hands curled into fists, but he couldn't risk drawing attention to himself by looking back. _Hang on Colonel,_ he thought grimly, his rage giving him new strength. A few more inches, and he had managed to pull himself around behind one of the lobby settees. It wasn't much cover, but it was better than nothing, especially in the darkness and chaos. The Colonel hadn't spoken again, and Paul didn't allow himself to think that might have been a death cry.

Another man was on the floor, his back half-propped against the wall as though he had been carelessly flung away and forgotten. His hands were cuffed, a gag stuffed in his mouth, and his chest was bloody from a long, vicious cut. No doubt another victim of the Colonel's assailant. The bound man's eyes widened at the sight of Paul, but he slid down the wall until he was flat on the floor, moving as cautiously as Paul did, close enough for Paul to finally untie the gag and pull it out of his mouth.

Their faces inches from each other, Paul whispered, "Major Paul Davis, United States Air Force."

The other man's eyes got even wider, and he had to work his jaw a moment before he could answer. "Uh, yeah," he finally whispered back. "Whatever. You _are_ gonna help me kill that motherfucker, right?"

* * *

He was on the verge of sleep when the weight of Daniel's warm body shifted under the covers.

"Jack?" Daniel murmured in a sleep-thick voice.

Jack blinked, trying to wake up enough to answer him. He patted Daniel's side with the palm of his hand, the soft flesh hot and lightly damp under the bedclothes. "Yeah," he managed at last. He touched his forehead between Daniel's shoulder blades. "You were expectin' somebody else?"

Daniel sighed sleepily and rolled onto his stomach, burying his face in the pillow. Jack kissed his ear and Daniel finally shifted over to face him, dragging the covers with him. Jack felt the breeze on his backside and tugged the covers back.

Daniel smiled. "Someone who doesn't hog the sheets, maybe."

Jack cupped his hand at the back of Daniel's neck and pulled him forward for a soundly reproving kiss. Daniel's eyes were sparkling when he drew back. "Or someone who doesn't come stumbling to bed in the middle of the night and wakes me out of lovely dreams..." Daniel murmured as his eyes fluttered shut. Jack kissed each closed lid.

"What were you dreaming about?"

"Nice things." Eyes still closed, Daniel raised his arms over his head and stretched as luxuriously as a cat. His chest trembled against Jack's, and he was half-hard against Jack's belly, his kneecap hitting Jack's lower thigh and the splayed toes of his right foot spread against Jack's ankle. "Pretty things." It was a toss-up whether Jack wanted more to tickle those vulnerable ribs or just kiss him silly.

He compromised, rolling a drowsily unresisting Daniel onto his back, and settling himself over him. "So you were dreaming about me, I guess."

"Of course I was." Daniel's arms were still stretched over his head, but he wasn't teasing when he opened his eyes again. "Anything you want, Jack." His expression was deadly earnest. He moved under Jack, cradling Jack's hips between his thighs. "Please. Anything you need."

* * *

Jim found the creature huddled in a corner of the wine cellar. It was wounded, bullets embedded in its chest and belly. It wasn't dying, but then, it wasn't really alive either.

Its eyes were open, tracking Jim in the darkness. Its lungs filled with air. Not to breathe, only to speak. "Would it do any good if I told you that you're trespassing?"

"This is your home?" Jim's voice sounded flat and normal in his own ears. It wasn't like talking to a dead man, after all. There were no biological processes going on here. No waste products being produced on the cellular level or on any other for that matter. Nothing but the faint, slightly stale smell of cold blood. Not human. Beef and lamb, Jim thought. Some pork.

"I pay the mortgage."

"So you're responsible for what's going on upstairs." Jim moved forward again.

"Trying to stop it, actually. The people who _are_ responsible got to me first. Who are you?"

"Jim Ellison. I'm a police officer."

"You smell human, but most humans I know can't see in the dark."

"Some can." Jim felt vaguely affronted. "I can."

"My mistake. You carrying?"

The SIG was a comfortable weight in his hand. "Why do you care? Bullets don't kill you, do they?" A memory was coming back to Jim, picking this typically inconvenient time to rise to rise to the surface of his consciousness after having been safely buried for decades.

_A warm summer night, playing catch with Stevie under the streetlights._

"Not me, but my friends upstairs are as human as you are, so be careful waving that thing around."

_Mom had already called them to come in, but it wasn't her out-of-patience, this time I REALLY mean it voice, and they had lingered on the sidewalk until the moon had risen over the rooftops._

_And then Jim had seen a man walking towards them up the sidewalk._

"Are your friends responsible for this?"

"Of course not." The creature hit the back of his own head against the wall -- gently-- in obvious frustration. "I already told you. We're trying to stop it."

_The man on the sidewalk in the darkness didn't sound like a person at all, he didn't even move like a person, and he smelled ... he smelled like the dirt Jim's mom turned up when she was planting the stunted brambles that she said would grown into rose bushes._

_No, worse even than that. He smelled like his mother's blood when she pricked herself on a thorn and drops fell onto the damp, black dirt. Jim had scooped up Stevie even though he was really too big for Jim to carry anymore and run into the house with him as fast as he could._

"Tell me how to stop it," Jim said. "Because by the feel of things so far your friends aren't doing a very good job."

"I don't know how," the creature said. "I don't even know for sure what's going on."

"That's not very helpful."

_For years afterwards, long after he remembered why, even after he'd stuffed these senses back into the same dark closet where that warm summer memory of playing catch was hidden too, when Jim awoke in the night he would go to the window and listen for men without heartbeat or respiration, who smelled like blood-soaked earth._

Sometimes, he even heard them.

"I do know who's responsible," the creature continued defensively. "I was kind of planning on just punching him out."

"Who is he?"

"A petty, opportunistic magus named Ethan Rayne. I wouldn't have thought he had something of this scale in him, frankly."

"I don't suppose you have a picture, do you?"

"Sorry."

"I'll see what I can do," Jim said, and started up the stairs. He'd already wasted too much time talking to a nightmare when he should have been looking for Blair.

But then he turned back anyway. "Will you be all right until your friends can help you?"

"Oh, I'm fine," the creature said. "But thanks for asking."


	9. Chapter 9

> When we dream, we do, we say, we hear, &amp;c. and &amp;c., that is, we _believe_ at the time we do so; and what more can be said of us when we are awake, then we believe we are doing, seeing, saying, and hearing, &amp;c.
> 
> The Night-Side of Nature (Crowe: 1848)

Blair awoke from a place without dreams to find the world was going to pieces. For a long time he lay very still while the world splintered beneath him, until at long last something smooth and rounded, smelling strongly of boot polish, nudged his cheek. Gently at first, then with greater insistence.

Blair tried to shift away, but his first movement drove shards of pain though the back of his skull. He froze, his stomach heaving, until the worst began to subside.

"Get up, Blair," a voice repeated with maddening persistence. "We need to talk."

Blair squinted his eyes open. The toe of a man's shoe was inches from his face. The carpet under his cheek spiraled outward in a wild confusion of blurred colors, gold and green and rose, and Blair wondered if they finally resolved themselves into reasonable vines and flowers somewhere on the far side of the world.

"Go on, get up," the voice was saying. "We've got some talking to do."

After a time, Blair managed to drag himself onto his hands and knees. He reached back carefully and touched the back of his head, finding his hair tacky with drying blood. So maybe it wasn't the world splintering. Maybe it was just his own skull.

"Did somebody hit me?"

"You were trying to help Major Davis."

Blair couldn't remember why Major Davis had needed help. For a long, slightly panicky moment, he couldn't even remember who Major Davis _was_. He sat back on his heels, one hand pressed hard against the side of his skull, and tried to focus on the man talking to him. He was sitting in an easy chair in front of a wall of bookshelves. The light in the room flickered gold, too dim for Blair to read the titles of any of the books. "Who are you?"

The man in the chair planted his foot in the middle of Blair's chest and shoved hard.

Blair managed to stop his fall with his elbows, but his eyesight blurred red around the edges. His head was pounding in time with his pulse, and the floor itself seemed to be humming. He scooted out of range, tensed for another blow. "What was that for?" he demanded weakly.

"The boys in Washington might be impressed by Mr. Rayne's proficiency with smoke and mirrors, but he's not the one running the show down here," said the man in the easy chair. "That means you talk to me now."

"Fine," Blair said, scooting further away. "That's just great." It wasn't his imagination -- the vibrations in the floor were more than the reflected strumming of his over-taxed nervous system. There were sounds in the building. They bled under the closed door and splashed the walls. They had weight and purpose, and as the waves vibrated through Blair they left his nerve endings stripped naked.

It occurred to him this must be the place Colonel O'Neill had hauled them down to Los Angeles to find. Wonder what the colonel had wanted them to do once they got here?

The man in the easy chair was saying something, but other sounds overwhelmed his voice. The carpeted floor buckled and Blair pitched forward into a gray morning. The sun might come out later, or maybe it would be pouring down rain by sunset. Hard to tell, but the way Blair's heart felt, he was pretty much counting on rain.

Jim hadn't said a word. Not since parking the truck and starting to walk. Blair didn't know if Jim wanted company or not. Well, no, that wasn't the truth. He was sure Jim would rather be alone right now, but Blair wasn't about to let him do this by himself.

The wooden planks rang hollow under their feet, and Blair wondered if Jim were distracting himself by listening to the waves splashing against the pilings. He swore to himself that he would hold his tongue and not talk first, but as the silence stretched longer and longer Blair began to fear they were building a wall that he'd never be able to scale, and finally he burst out, "Why aren't you saying anything?"

Real smooth. Did he _want_ Jim to turn around and bite his head off?

Maybe he did. It would have been more tolerable than what Jim actually  
said.

"There's nothing to say, Chief." Jim didn't even look back. "It's all been said. It's out. It's over." Blair had never heard him sound so defeated. "I just thought we had an agreement that I was going to read your thesis first."

Blair had promised himself not to get angry, just like he'd sworn he wouldn't be the first one to break the awful silence. But since it turned out knowing what Jim thought was so much worse than silence, he snapped back guiltily, "Look, I didn't do this."

As if that could put the genie back in the bottle.

"Right," Jim said flatly. "You didn't write the book and you didn't put my name all over it."

Blair stopped. Jim walked on.

Huh.

So that's what Jim had been thinking for the past three and a half years. Go figure.

Blair sat down on the nearest bench. All this time, Jim had thought Blair's academic career was a betrayal of their friendship. And he'd kept Blair at his side nevertheless. For god's sake, _why_? Had Blair made him so dependent on his help that Jim didn't think he could manage alone?

Or maybe he had simply loved Blair too much to send him away. Even while waiting for the inevitable Judas kiss.

Blair sat and watched Jim walking further and further away, until the sight of that bowed head and those steadily striding legs began to blur, and with a wrench at his already-broken heart, Blair found himself in the library once more, sprawled on his back with vines twining across the carpet. He sat up gingerly, his head clanging like a gong. The man in the easy chair was weeping, tears streaming silently down his face, and despite everything Blair felt a stab of pity for him, and wondered what he had seen.

Though he was dry-eyed himself, Blair felt wrung to the bone, empty in the place where his heart should have been. Telling himself that it hadn't happened like that didn't ease the ache of grief. Blair crawled to his feet, bracing himself hard against the desk in the middle of the room. He closed his eyes as his stomach lurched and his head swam, and when he felt steady enough to open his eyes again, the man in the chair was watching him steadily, though he hadn't bothered to wipe the tears from his face.

"I don't know who your Mr. Rayne is," Blair announced shakily, "but I'd say he's pretty good with this smoke and mirrors business."

* * *

As far as Sam was concerned, there was no reason to sneak around any longer, so she and Teal'c went in through the front door.

No one particularly seemed to notice.

The first thing she noticed however was that the floor wasn't level. From the threshold it slanted precipitously down towards the column where she had just seen the Colonel stabbed. She flattened herself instinctively against the wall to keep from falling.

Except the column wasn't there any longer, and neither was the Colonel. Or maybe they were, but as figures and objects retreated from the front door they diminished to pinpoints, a geometric progression of exponential decay. Even the candlelight seemed attenuated and dim as it was dragged down. Like being just this side of an event horizon.

She squeezed her eyes shut and flung her arm out for Teal'c. He caught her hand and held on tightly

"This is not real," she said sternly, taking no pains to be quiet. The fabric of the universe strained to the breaking point made enough noise to cover her voice. "We'd already have been pulled apart if this was real." And it was true, having closed her eyes she no longer felt in imminent danger of falling, but she was still aware of the forward drag. Her very words seem to drop from her mouth like stones to the bottom of a well. She tried turning her head to the right and carefully opening her eyes again, this time trying to focus only upon the wall and not towards the center of the room. It almost worked. The wall wasn't bending, though the world's diminishment in her peripheral vision made it difficult to keep her balance.

She eased forward one careful step, wondering how she was going to reach the Colonel if they could only cling to the edges of the room, and then she tripped straight over the edge.

She felt the fall in the pit of her stomach, but with the next swing she was back to chipping ice off the DHD. Her hands ached, and she didn't know if that was frostbite, or just sore muscles. She'd long since given up trying to melt the ice. It had never been a very good idea in the first place, given the amount of fuel expended compared to the progress made, but there had been some important psychological comfort in the bare fact of warmth. That was the sort of thing that was important to the Colonel. He pretended he was all about tough choices and the bottom line, but he was a softer touch than she was. The price he'd paid over the years, he could afford to be.

He had died about thirteen hours ago. Sam had been three meters away at the time, pounding at this solid block of ice and chattering on without expecting an answer. When she took a break to go back and check on him, he'd been beyond ever answering her again.

She had tried to close his eyes, but had to settle for pulling the thermal blanket over his face. She bent and touched her lips to the silver sheet covering his forehead, and then she went back to work. She had promised to get him home. All she had to do was chip the rest of the ice off the DHD.

Her vision blurred, but she wouldn't let herself cry. Tears would have frozen on her cheeks.

Teal'c caught her arm when she tried to swing again. She was on her knees in the lobby of the Hyperion, one shoulder against the wall. For a moment she thought she might cry after all. Was there a time when the human mind just decided 'no more' and stopped trying to fight?

It wouldn't happen to her, though. The Colonel still needed her help, and this time she wouldn't fail him.

"Major Carter. Teal'c," someone gasped. "Thank God."

Sam's eyes flew open.

Paul Davis was right in front of her, his face white as a sheet in the flickering candlelight, his once-pristine shirt crumpled and black with blood. "Major," he continued. "Please forgive the lack of formalities, but this is Charles Gunn, and you need to hear what he has to say."

* * *

Aw, _jesus_, Daniel.

Jack squeezed his eyes shut and buried his head against Daniel's shoulder. Daniel was moving beneath him, a sweet, easy slide and thrust, and just like before it was too good to last very long. Jack supposed it was selfish of him, but this time he wanted more. He wanted to see Daniel's face. He wanted to touch him everywhere. With his hands. With his mouth. God help him, he even wanted to _talk_ to Daniel. Hear him laugh. See him smile.

Daniel's thighs flexed hard against his hipbones, and Jack worried vaguely that he giving himself bruises, but the slide and press across Daniel's corded belly felt too damn good to stop. Jack kept surging forward even as he tried to slow himself down, until in desperation he pushed Daniel's right knee to the mattress. He wanted to think here, just for a moment, and there was no point even trying while he was between Daniel's legs.

Daniel ran his left foot across the back of Jack's thigh, over knotted calf muscles, and then up again. Slower this time, the callus on his heel tickling the sensitive spot behind Jack's knee. Then Daniel let his leg fall open and canted his hips just so, and Jack forgot all about slowing down.

This was just fine, really. They could always talk later.

Daniel craned his neck up so he could kiss Jack's ear, and whispered, "It's OK. I want you to."

Jack tried to laugh. It came out as a groan. "OK?" he managed.

Daniel wasn't laughing either. "It'll be all right," he gasped

.

* * *

Shattering reality over and over again and putting it back together a little less neatly each time. Blair had to wonder how many repetitions the world could take before there weren't enough pieces left to stick back together anymore.

He turned his hands up and and saw for the first time that they were covered with blood. The front of his shirt was stiff with it as well. All that couldn't have come from the knock on the back of his own head.

Major Davis.

The memory was still fragmented, but Blair had a sudden, vivid recollection of gunfire on a dark street, and the headlight from a passing car illuminating the stunned expression on Paul's face.

"You shot him," Blair said, his voice shaking at the realization. "You son of a bitch, he was trying to help me, and you _shot_ him."

"I executed him," the man in the chair corrected mildly, and he finally got up. Blair held his ground mostly because he had nowhere else to go. "We lost eleven agents at Blewett Pass, and Major Davis was collaborating with the men responsible for their deaths."

Those were the agents who had kidnapped Jim, nearly killing him with tear gas in the process. Blair couldn't quite allow himself to think that they had deserved to die, but it must have been close enough to the surface because the man lashed out, backhanding Blair. He staggered, hardly aware of impact across his face because the force of the blow seemed to have knocked his brains out the back of his head. His assailant grabbed the scruff of his neck when his knees buckled and slammed him face down on the desk. Blair's world went gray and quiet for a while, until a stuttering rhythm like a failing heart brought him back.

Something hard and metallic bore painfully against his ear. Blair supposed it was the muzzle of a gun. "How did Ellison do it?"

Blair counted his own shallow breaths, trying to concentrate on the question and not on the vibrations coming up through the desk. His breastbone rang with them, the rattle of the world shaking itself to pieces. His personal world was going to end a little bit faster than the rest if he didn't figure out a way to calm down this maniac with a gun.

"Sorry man --" he managed. "But how did Jim do _what_?"

"Eleven agents in two vehicles. You expect me to believe Detective Ellison and a civilian linguist overcame them all and then disposed of the bodies as well?"

Oh, that.

The man above him released the safety. Blair felt it in his skull more than he heard the sound itself.

"Let me up and I'll tell you," Blair tried. "You blow my brains out, and you'll never know."

By way of answer, the man punched him twice in the back. Blair's head jerked sharply against the gun, and for an instant he was sure he was already dead. He sagged back to the desk as the smeared, bloody pain in his kidneys let him know he was still alive. Something warm and wet trickled across his scalp and dribbled down the side of his neck, and the man above him was leaning into him hard, the point of his elbow skewering him between his shoulder blades.

As Blair gasped for breath around the explosions in his head and his back, he had to wonder why he'd been so keen on living just a little while longer after all. Especially if this was all he had to look forward to.

* * *

Jack froze at Daniel's words.

OK, something was wrong if Daniel felt he had to promise everything would eventually be all right. He forced himself to roll away, pulling Daniel onto his side and clamping his hands on Daniel's shoulders. Jack had known something was the matter right from the first, dammit, but he had wanted so badly to believe that he could hold Daniel without consequences. It was never that simple. In fact, something had happened the first time they had been together, hadn't it? Something that left a cold, sick feeling in his gut when he tried to remember.

"What's going on, Daniel?" he asked gently, schooling the fear out of his voice. "This isn't just about you and me, is it?"

Daniel smiled at him, but there was something lurking in his eyes that was so sad. "Then what is it about?" He brushed Jack's lips with his fingertips, but Jack turned his face away.

"I don't know. Something." Even as he said it, an appalling memory flashed into Jack's mind. Something had come to their bed that night. Soft and reeking, and Jack had thought he might go insane when he saw it touching Daniel.

There had been more. Jack didn't know if it had been the same night or some time later, but he remembered a creature with cloven hooves, heads facing in every direction and angel's wings like some ancient city's appalling god-king.

That abomination had been crawling out of Daniel's bed.

"God, Daniel --" He shut his eyes as though that could banish the memories. "_Please._" Even as he pleaded, though, pain shot through his side as though a giant fist had suddenly wrapped itself around his ribs and started to squeeze. Jack couldn't breathe past it. His own rib cage had become a vise inexorably crushing his heart. He flailed out in panic but Daniel caught him and immediately pulled Jack close, wrapping his arms around him, cradling Jack's head to his breast. Jack could hear the thunder of Daniel's own heart, and the pressure on his chest slowly began to ease. Daniel stroked his back, held him, laid his cheek against the top of Jack's head while trying to curl himself around him.

"You're all right," he whispered to Jack. "You're all right. I've got you."

And it was true. The worst of the pain was fading. He could breathe again, cautious sips of air at first, and when the pain didn't return he filled his lungs. He still felt a dull ache between his ribs, as though he'd pulled a muscle running, but that was the worst of it. "Daniel," he murmured, his voice hoarse. "What are you doing?"

Daniel kissed the top of his head. "I'm just making sure you're all right."

Jack pulled away and looked at him. Daniel's eyes were dull, half-closed in exhaustion. "We need to go," Jack said. "I think something's coming."

Daniel nodded. His face had gone so white it was all but translucent. A blue vein Jack had never noticed before crossed Daniel's left temple like a scar, and the circles under his eyes were gray.

"Daniel?"

"You go on," Daniel said. "I'll be right behind you."

Oh, right. Jack was on the verge of telling him just what he thought about _that_ idea when a door slammed somewhere down the hall. Jack started at the noise, but Daniel just blinked.

"Please go, Jack," he said. "I don't want you to see this."

"God_dammit_, Daniel--"

Daniel reached up and touched Jack's lips to silence him. His fingers trembled against Jack's mouth. "Don't worry. I'm sure it won't work."

"What won't work?" This was something Jack was supposed to know, but he couldn't put the pieces together fast enough. Music was playing somewhere close by. Jack could feel it echoing through the walls. "This is no damn time for twenty questions. What won't work?"

Daniel took his hand away from Jack's face and held it out to demonstrate how bad his tremors had grown. He let his arm drop. "I even can't get myself around anymore." He smiled, and Jack saw his lips had gone blue. "I'll never be able to support _that_."

* * *

The man at the kitchen doors stood in an attitude of profound listening, a Colt revolver clutched in both hands and raised almost as high as his head. Jim could have told him a thing or two about how useless his stance was. For one thing, there was nothing to hear on the other side of that door. Splintered gasps of human voice, now and again, but everything else was caught in a vortex spinning away to unimaginable destinations. And on this side of the threshold the only thing to hear was Jim Ellison coming up from behind, and he'd missed that too.

Jim felt pretty certain he must be one of the human friends the creature in the cellar had told him about. Neither of them seemed very good with firearms.

"Police," Jim said sharply, putting his own gun to the back of his neck. "Freeze."

The man started and then, to his credit, froze.

"Drop your weapon."

Not so quick to comply this time.

"Drop your weapon," Jim repeated. "I'm way the hell out of my jurisdiction, so I'd really rather not shoot you."

Another long moment passed, and then at last the man lowered his weapon. "Yes," he said faintly. British. He let the revolver drop to the floor. "I'd hate to cause unnecessary paperwork."

* * *

> Then at a deadly pace  
>  It came from outer space  
>  And this is how the message ran...
> 
> _Science Fiction/Double Feature_ (O'Brien: 1974)

* * *

There had been something alive on P3X-636 after all.

And now the NID was using ... magic. Or, something. Old musicals and an avant-gard play to transport this unknown alien to earth.

Well, obviously, Sam thought. Why hadn't she figured it out for herself?

"Major Davis," she said gently, and placed the back of her hand against his forehead to check for fever. "I think you're going into shock."

At that, the wounded civilian Davis had apparently taken into his confidence without a second's thought for security concerns snapped, "Lady, the whole fucking world's going into shock, or hadn't you noticed?" He gestured furiously behind himself, towards the maelstrom in the center of the room, and his hand and arm seemed to disappear into the void. His head whipped around in frustration, and as time stuttered, Sam saw his face frozen in a thousand individual snapshots. "You've got to stop the music."

* * *

So, all right. Jack had found himself in conversations like this before with Daniel. He knew how they worked. No point in continuing the discussion. Not even dragging the man along by the scruff of the neck would help. The best he could hope for was that Daniel would finally notice him, because not once in all this time had Jack ever won the argument. The best he'd ever done was to make Daniel _see_ him, Jack O'Neill, standing here at his side.

Lying at his side, now, but the principle was the same. He put his hand on the back of Daniel's head, drew him forward and kissed his face. "I've got another idea," he told Daniel calmly, even though the music in the hall seemed to be getting louder. "How about you and me blow this joint together?"

Then without waiting for Daniel to answer he got out of bed, pulled on his pants and and tucked in his shirt before turning back. Daniel still lay on his side, watching Jack with shadowed eyes. "Or how does dinner sound? We could get Thai this time. It sounds good, really."

Jack," he said, his voice ominously gentle.

Jack quickly turned his back on Daniel again and got busy looking for some clothes , raising his voice to drown out anything else Daniel might be planning to say. "Or we could go back to Gunn's chili dog place. Good food. I'd probably need to skip the extra onions and jalapenos this time --" He finally found Daniel's suitcase half-kicked into the coat closet and snapped open the latches, only to find it packed full of books. "All right, I give up. Where the hell did you put your clothes?"

No doubt about it -- the music in the corridor was definitely getting louder.

"Jack," Daniel said again. "You know it doesn't matter now."

Right.

Jack stomped back to the bed and pulled Daniel up. He yanked the sheet off the bed and wrapped it around his shoulders, while Daniel tolerated the manhandling without comment or complaint. "If naked you came, then naked's the way you'll leave. Come on."

"Never knew you were such a philosopher," Daniel finally said. "Oh, wait. Yes, I did."

That spark of Daniel gave Jack new hope. "And up we go," he said, his arm tightening around Daniel's ribs as he tried to hoist him to his feet.

Daniel immediately fainted dead away, slipping from Jack's arms to sprawl across the floor in a graceless muddle of bared limbs and tangled bedclothes.

* * *

Jim pushed the stranger against the wall and held him with the gun at the back of his neck as he patted him down, relieving him of a hunting knife, brass knuckles, a switchblade tucked into his sock and a brace of smooth wooden stakes under his jacket.

"We really don't have time for this," the stronger protested.

"No," Jim agreed, "we don't. Can you point Ethan Rayne out to me?"

"Why do you want him?"

"Your friend in the wine cellar seems to think he's the best chance we have to stop this."

"Is Angel all right?"

"_Angel_?"

"Dammit, man --"

"He has four bullets in him," Jim said. "But I didn't put them there, and I gather they're not necessarily that much of a problem for him." He handed back the weapons. The switchblade, the hunting knife. The brass knuckles and the stakes. He took back his private armory from Jim with raised eyebrows and a faint sense of vindication which Jim didn't have time to begrudge him. Besides, he probably thought Jim couldn't read his expression by flashlight.

He reached for his Colt, but Jim picked it up it first and emptied the bullets into his hand before giving him the gun.

"I need that," he complained.

"For the last time, can you point out Ethan Rayne to me?"

"Yes, already. I'm Wyndam-Pryce by the way, not that you asked. "

"I'll get the spelling later. And one gun between us is plenty. I'm a better shot than you."

"You can't possibly know that."

"Yes," Jim said, and turned off Wesley's flashlight. "Actually I do."

* * *

"Oh, hell," Jack muttered. The record playing in the room down the hall began to skip as he dropped to his knees beside Daniel and lifted his head. Daniel blinked up at him. "Hey."

"Hey, yourself. Any chance you can get up and walk out here?"

"Sorry." Daniel managed a quick smile. His breathing was quick and shallow, his skin cold to the touch even though he was sweating. Jack helped him sit up, and that minimal effort made Daniel begin to shake. Jack tucked the sheet around him as he pondered their options. He could carry Daniel a short distance if he had to, but all the way out of the building? No. He couldn't trust their lives to his aging knees and back.

Wait a minute. Of course. They were in the Hyperion after all. "Angel and Wesley must be here somewhere. We'll get them to help."

Daniel shook his head. "They're not here. No one's here but us."

"What do you mean they're not here? Half of Los Angeles is here between the NID and those actors and Blair Sandburg and --"

"No," Daniel said. "We're not in the Hyperion."

"Then where in the name of God _are_ we?"

"I'm not sure." Daniel scrunched up his face in concentration. "But I think Ethan Rayne opened a portal from '636 and we're ... I'm not entirely sure. I think we're just sort of hanging around in the vestibule."

"What, like a couple of cosmic doormen?"

Another faint, pained smile. "Sort of."

"Well that makes it simpler, right? Because neither one of are are gonna be ushering anything through to earth."

Daniel nodded.

"What?" Jack was instantly suspicious again. "There's something you're not telling me. What's going on?'

"You should go, Jack."

"I'm not, so deal with it."

"Look at the way our minds have constructed this -- this place. Not like a foyer, and I'm not dressed like a doorman either." He let the sheet fall open, as though Jack didn't already know he was naked as an egg underneath. "I think the Revenuers' sleeping god will try to take corporeal form and reach earth though an, ah, assignation."

"A _what_?" Jack demanded, even though he knew perfectly well what Daniel had said. "All right, that's it. We're out of here." He got up, intending to pull Daniel over his shoulder by brute force if necessary.

Daniel fought him. "It's too _late_," he panted, and with an icy horror in his gut, Jack turned to see the shadow moving restlessly back and forth under the closed door.

"She certainly can," Ethel Merman sang again and again. "She certainly can. She certainly can."

* * *

Sam felt as though she were trying to swim against a powerful tide. Sounds and memories beat at her. Visions, nightmares and dreams. Things that had never happened. Things she would never forget. She saw Daniel offering himself as a host, and the Jaffa pulling him forward as he sacrificed his very existence to be with Sha'uri. She saw Teal'c at Cor-ai, facing his own staff weapon in Hannos' hands. Jack shouted in furious protest and Daniel was talking frantically about mitigating circumstances and judicial mercy. She heard the staff weapon fire and knew the moment Teal'c died by the way Daniel's face crumpled, all his words gone to dust.

Sam shook herself free of the stench of burnt flesh and the lingering sound of Jack's single, hoarse sob, and saw the lobby of the Hyperion once more. The flames on the candles didn't flicker. Jack and Daniel were pinned against a marble column, the upper half of Daniel's face covered with a black cloth. Jack's leather jacket was ripped and stained red, and Sam saw a drop of blood suspended motionless three feet above a pool of red on the floor. Music came from a pair of bookcase speakers hanging above Jack and Daniel's pinioned hands, and Sam could see the sound waves caught mid-ripple across their white, intertwined fingers.

She managed another step before she heard Cassandra's frightened voice calling for her as she swung the steel doors shut at the base of the missile silo. Everything that was human screamed for her to go back, to try to contain the explosion by holding Cassie in the circle of her arms, but something more than her humanity wouldn't let her return. This is what the war had asked of her. To deny everything she was in the name of the greater good as she lay supine under Bynarr, the host's body heaving against Rosha, and though Jolinar longed to retreat, she stayed close and bore the violation with her.

Until Sam managed another step and once more saw Jack and Daniel's interlaced fingers and the sound waves moving across their hands like sunlight on the water.

* * *

The door flew open behind the agent who held down Blair on the desk, the muzzle of his gun pinching his ear against his skull. Blair couldn't see the open door, but he felt the gossamer boundaries of the universe flapping madly in its wake. Around the curtains of existence was a glimpse of the beach unmarred by footsteps, and beyond that were ruins unfathomably ancient before Earth's sun had begun to burn. A shadow moved massively across the shattered landscape as a woman's voice said, "The king has opened his tattered mantle."

"Police," Jim said. "Put it down slow."

Blair's heart began to thump so hard he knew the man holding him down must be able to feel it. The pressure against his ear suddenly eased as his captor hefted the weapon and squeezed off a shot.

Before the bullet left the chamber Blair had already flung himself upwards, clawing at existence with both hands. In a series of snaps like cheap plastic shower curtain rings breaking one after another, he ripped down a reality that had abruptly gone from being unpleasant to flatly, absolutely unacceptable.

* * *

Teal'c burst into Amaunet's pavilion, leaving the entrance flanked by the queen's dead Jaffa, and inside found them together. Daniel and Sha'uri were huddled on Amaunet's woven rugs, their arms around one another and the two of them quaking like the aspen trees O'Neill had shown Teal'c in the mountains northwest of Colorado Springs. Sha'uri beamed, dazzled with triumph and happiness, while Daniel's tears were still wet on his face, his forehead red from Amaunet's hand device.

Faced with the imminent death of her beloved first husband, Sha'uri must have been able to overcome the influence of the queen she carried within her. Such things were not unprecedented, though it had been foolhardy of Daniel to trust his life to Sha'uri's ability to defy the symbiote. Teal'c clasped her upper arm, Amaunet's gaudy gold sleeve slick to the point of oiliness under his hand.

"Teal'c," Daniel said in a hoarse voice. "It's all right. We're all right."

Sha'uri made no attempt to free her arm. "Teal'c," she said simply, her pronunciation better than Daniel's had ever been. Teal'c wondered, distantly, if that had been a calculated insult all along, just like Daniel's refusal to pronounce the diphthong in the world _goa'uld._

Like so many things, he and Daniel Jackson had never spoken of it.

With a shake of his forearm, he flung Sha'uri down in a corner of opulent pavilion and leveled his staff weapon, making it a clean kill despite Daniel's scream. She had hardly deserved so honorable a death for defying her god.

Then Teal'c turned to Daniel.

* * *

Jack put himself between the door and Daniel, for all the good it did. The wood screamed under unimaginable pressure, not splintering but bending inward like rubber and a stench like sulfur, and then it was gone and something was in the room with them. Jack saw wings and heard a voice saying, "The king has opened his tattered mantle," as Daniel's body arched into the maelstrom.

* * *

A face swam up in front of Sam, wide-eyed with ecstasy. "It's glorious," he said, his words slipping away into the cacophony of music. "Glorious!" There was blood on his hands, on his face, and it _was_ glorious, at least for instant, because if there was one thing Sam understood, it was that raw energy was the most beautiful thing in the universe, and for once in her life, she was allowed to experience it without the mediation of numbers, which were beautiful in their own right, but nothing like _this._

Behind her, something popped like a gunshot.

The blood-stained man spun around, a curse on his lips. Somewhere, someone was talking about a tattered king, but what had been inevitable a moment before now seemed only one possible outcome among many. The destructive power of the universe was beautiful, but given the choice, living was even better. She spotted the portable CD player on the settee and grabbed it with both hands to send it smashing to the floor.

Sound splintered into a thousand glittering fragments.

* * *

Daniel fought briefly, but his grief and despair made him weak, and in the end, he couldn't stop Teal'c, who proceeded to write the consequences of Daniel Jackson's sins large upon his body. He deserved death but Teal'c was merciful, and when he was sated he pushed Daniel's face to the rug and told him to kiss the ground where his gods and masters had trod.

As Teal'c rose to his feet Amaunet's pavilion spun around him and fell to pieces, and he was back in the hotel lobby where a man's voice was reciting, "I knew no bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign." The delivery was stilted, stresses falling on the wrong syllables and words running together until Teal'c barely recognized the language as English. Not that he was paying very much attention. His head and his heart were burning with a shame so fierce he thought it might consume him whole.

It was a dream. An hallucination. He had _never_ attacked Daniel Jackson. He had killed Sha'uri only to save his life, and he would have made any restitution Daniel had ever asked of him. That was the only truth. He could not, he would not have acted any other way. That he could see such things at all only showed how perverse the NID's attempt to raise the sleeping god truly was.

His head came up as the woman he'd been sent to find began to speak, her words breaking in the wrong places, and the veneer of existence crackling along with her voice like ice melting on a frozen lake, "The king has opened his tattered mantle."

For a long moment, still dazed, his soul battered by his vision, Teal'c could not remember the name Major Davis had given him, and was afraid he'd have to break her neck to stop her.

"There's naught. But Christ. To --"

"Cordelia Chase," Teal'c bellowed, rage suddenly tearing the words from his throat. He would be a pawn to blasphemers no longer. He would not suffer these perversions of his honor, nor would he tolerate a universe where all that he held dear could be cast aside so lightly.

"Be _SILENT_!"

The end of sound was shattering. Teal'c fell, dashed to the ground by the weight of silence. All the candles winked out, and in the profound darkness Teal'c was aware of nothing but the entire planet tumbling blind and headlong through space.

* * *

"_Excuse_ me," Cordelia said, finally breaking character when it became clear that no one else was going to do anything. "We _are_ in the middle of a dress rehersal here. Could somebody please get the lights?"

* * *

> "They will be very curious to know the tragedy -- they of the outside world who write books and print millions of newspapers, but I will write no more, and the father confessor will seal my last words with the seal of sanctity when his holy office is done."
> 
> Robert W. Chambers, "The Yellow Sign"

* * *

Nine hours later when Blair made it to the balcony to watch the sun rise, he found someone else had beat him there . He almost turned back, but it had been such a struggle climbing the stairs in the first place, especially the way his head was pounding, that he went out anyway. The pre-dawn air was warm and sooty, and the stars had vanished from the night sky. The other man didn't say anything until Blair was practically next to him, and then he spread out his hand, gesturing toward the glow on the eastern horizon. "I don't think that's really the sun coming up," he said quietly. "I think those are the fires still burning from last night."

"Oh," Blair said. He hadn't known about the fires.

"I rather dread dawn," the stranger continued. "Even though I can't see it, I can almost feel how much the city's changed. God knows how many buildings have been left standing."

Jim had been able to feel it, too. He had been gone for hours now with Teal'c and Major Carter, and though he'd been reluctant to leave, he couldn't stay. Blair hadn't asked him to. Not when Jim could hear the moans of the trapped, the wounded and the dying all around them. Right now, other people needed Jim more. In the meantime, though, his separation from Jim ached like a bone-deep bruise. "Wesley Wyndam-Pryce," the stranger suddenly announced, and stuck out his hand. "I don't believe we've been formally introduced."

Blair shook. This was the whole point of manners, after all. Useful little rituals to get you through the awkward moments. Something to do with your hands and your mind to reduce the possibility of going absolutely batshit in the interstices. "Blair Sandburg."

"I know," Wesley said. "Shouldn't you be resting?"

"I'm fine," Blair snapped more sharply than he'd intended. The point of coming up here had been to get away from all the people who all seemed to know more about him than he did about them. But even as he answered, his head began to spin and he had to lean hard against the balustrade.

"Take it easy," Wesley said in his precise voice. More Oxford don or BBC commentator? Blair wondered woozily as Wesley took his arm and eased him down.

The roofline dipped and swirled, but the world underneath, the one that really mattered, was reassuringly solid and stationary under his butt. "Are you all right?" Wesley asked. "Do I need to get help?"

"I'm fine." Blair propped his elbows on his knees and covered his eyes with both hands.

"Forgive me, but you don't appear to be fine."

"Just tired," Blair didn't raise his head. "I don't remember the last time I slept."

"All the more reason for you to rest now. Let me help you downstairs."

It wasn't worth arguing about. "Just give me a minute."

A siren began to scream several blocks away, making them both flinch. Blair thought about Jim out there, just as tired as he was, dealing with the noise and the chaos without him.

"Has Dr. Jackson woken up yet?"

Blair raised his head. The sky was getting lighter. "No. He should be in a hospital."

"So should Gunn. Should Jack. So should you. How did you get dragged into all this anyway? You're an anthropology professor in Cascade, Washington, is that correct? And Jim's a police officer. If there's some connection with Ethan Rayne and a rogue branch of U.S. military intelligence, I'm afraid I can't see it."

Blair snorted. "It's a mystery to me as well."

"You've worked with Jack O'Neill and Dr. Jackson before now, I think Jack said."

Blair didn't disagree, even though "worked with" made it sound like that nightmare on Christmas day had been somehow voluntary on his part.

"But you're not Air Force."

Blair could almost grin at that. "Do I _look_ Air Force to you, man?"

"I suppose not. Jim, though --"

"Special Forces. But it's been years, now."

"Ah."

Starlings had begun to congregate along the roofline, black against a graying sky.

"Dr. Jackson is a brilliant man," Wesley said abruptly. "One of the lights of his generation. I wish we had been able to meet under less trying circumstances." A silence. "I pray he's going to be all right."

Blair thought about the expression on Colonel O'Neill's face as they'd laid Daniel Jackson out by candlelight. Daniel had looked like a corpse, but Jack was the one with a face of stone. Not even a flicker in those dark eyes.

What about you?" Blair said to change the subject. "How did you end up a part of all this? Do you live here?"

"I only work here. My apartment's out in Silverlake. If it's still standing, that is." At that, Wesley got up and turned around to look over the balustrade again. "Oh," he said softly.

Blair got to his feet more slowly, but as careful as he was, the back of his head began to pound so badly he let his arms rest on the balustrade and lowered his head again, eyes squeezed shut, until he was certain he wasn't going to puke or faint. Then he opened his eyes carefully and looked out at what remained of North Hollywood and the rest of Los Angeles by the gray light of a very late dawn.

* * *

Cordelia waited. One beat. Two beats. Three.

Nothing. Not only did the lights not come up, but no one said a word. She could hear her costar Gregor breathing close to her in quick, scared pants, but the big baby didn't say a word.

Did she have to do _everything_ herself?

She took a moment more to get her sense of direction in the dark, and then took off confidently towards the Hyperion's front door. Before she had gotten very far, though, a single flashlight flickered yellow off to her right, and it became clear why nothing was happening.

The blocking was all screwed up. She'd known Ethan's last-minute decision to cast Daniel Jackson as the Tattered King was a bad idea. No matter how pretty they were, it just never paid to work with amateurs. Daniel was supposed to be standing alone at the central pillar for the final lines of the play, and instead he seemed to be surrounded by the mob at the crucifixion. "For pete's sake you guys--" she began, and then stopped dead.

Ethan?

Ethan Rayne?

For the past six weeks she'd been rehearsing a play produced by _Ethan Rayne_?

Intellect fought with memory, and then she stormed forward, livid with rage. Daniel's bodyguard Jack Something-or-Other was strung up against the post beside him, and for some reason Ethan was flashing a pocket knife around and hissing threats.

"You cowardly little weasel," Cordelia snapped. "You _unspeakable_, dried-up old fraud. What did you do? A cheap enchantment? Some bargain basement glamour? Do you know I was halfway in _love_ with you?"

His eyes darted in her direction. "Not now, darling Cordelia," he soothed. "You know how the critics can be."

"Critics? There aren't going to be any critics! I've wasted six weeks of my life learning incomprehensible lines for an idiotic play and the columnist for the _Weekly_ isn't even here, is he?"

A blonde woman who really needed to spend some quality time with her stylist started to block Cordelia's way, but she brushed past her. "You know, summoning demons is one thing, but this is my _career_ you've been messing with."

"One step closer and I'll cut his throat," Ethan said, and that was the final straw, because he wasn't even talking to _her_.

Cordelia punched him in the nose so hard she felt her knuckles crack.

> Make in a circle the character of Klepoth or Kepoth, speak the following eleven words Ador, Klepoth, Chelath, Migaroth, Cabot, Silma, Sirath, Sernchiel, Rotho, Maron, Collen, and continuously thereafter you will hear a pleasant music.
> 
> _The Key of King Solomon, by Armadel. Book 3: Concerning the Spirits and their Capabilities_ (Edited and transcribed from British Library manuscript Lans. 1202 by Joseph H. Peterson. )

  


* * *

When the policeman opened the door to the lobby, Wesley thought it was already too late, because Ethan had obviously succeeded in coaxing something damned big most of the way across. This plane felt more fragile than dragonfly wings, flickering and fluttering over a dark, muddy pond. Something incomprehensibly vast lurked in the waters, and at any moment its head would break the surface. He caught a single glimpse of Ethan, and he thought Jack was there in the lobby, too, but the impression was fleeting.

Candlelight danced. Dragonfly wings.

The policeman fell to his knees with a groan. Wesley dropped beside him. "Give me your gun, at least," he said. "I have a chance of stopping this if I can get to Ethan."

Really, though, Wesley didn't much believe that anymore.

The policeman reached out with his free hand and grabbed Wesley's forearm, hard. His eyes were closed. "Help me," he said urgently.

"It would make more sense right now if you would help _me_."

The policeman bowed his head, his grip tightening on Wesley's forearm to the point of pain. Wesley thought he said, "The sea's getting in," but that made no sense, and besides, it was hard to understand him over the howling maelstrom. From time to time Wesley thought he heard lines from Cordelia's play, too, but they were nothing like his rehearsals with her. Now they sounded like a dirge for the entire universe.

"Let me go," Wesley said, trying harder to pull free. "Please. You've got to let me try."

The policeman finally raised his head. His eyes opened. "Chief," he breathed. Suddenly he released Wesley and stumbled to his feet, backing up until he hit the front desk. Wesley looked to the center of the lobby, where there was nothing anymore, just a twist of reality like a bit of lemon peel, and then again at the policeman. With one hand on the desk, then against the wall, he was moving purposefully towards the office. After a moment of indecision Wesley followed. Mostly because he seemed like the only purposeful element left in the world.

The policeman stopped at the closed door, and in the flickering light Wesley saw him poised with his gun held upright like the hero of some American cops-and-robbers TV show.

Then he smashed in the door.

A lantern was burning in the office, and compared to the chaos behind them in the lobby, the room looked like a warm, golden cave. Two men were bent over the desk, half-entwined like wrestlers or lovers, and the policeman said, "Police, freeze," just the way he'd said it to Wesley. Cordelia's voice came floating through the whirlwind, and it sounded like she'd finally gotten those lines about the tattered king right for the first time.

The policeman staggered, crying out in pain at the same time Wesley heard the gunshot.

Then something changed.

There was a ripple across the already-battered remnants of this plane. Cordy's voice faltered. Wesley had an instant to realize the other sounds in dark harmony with her had been an _Irving Berlin_ song, for God's sake, before they ceased, too. The bullet had left the gun, but it hadn't struck the policeman after all. He hadn't stumbled or shouted in pain.

Then the lantern winked out.

"Hey, it's all right, I've got his gun," said one of the two men from within the office. "Jim, it's OK, don't shoot."

A muttered exclamation, and then the flat sound of flesh against flesh. "Stop it," said the same voice. "It's over, man. I'm all right."

Everything stopped. Not just the sound of the fight. Everything. Wesley turned around slowly. The lobby was dark and silent, and nothing was trying to break through.

Almost nothing. Wesley turned back slowly, eyes straining for the faintest glimmer of light. He had felt _something_ in this room, just for an instant. Something powerful enough to deflect an entity so vast it would have ruptured reality.

Something faster than a speeding bullet, too, he thought, with an insane urge to laugh.

A light finally came on from somewhere behind him in the lobby. He heard Cordy complaining violently, but he couldn't look away yet. He had to know what he had sensed.

In the dim light he saw one man unconscious on the floor. There were two others beside him. The policeman -- _Jim_ \-- was holding another man whose long hair fell in his face. Jim's arm was around his shoulders, his other hand on the back of his neck, pulling him forward to tuck his face against his shoulder. Petting his hair. "Chief," Jim said. "Blair."

"I'm OK."

"You're bleeding," Jim said, halfway between a sob and a laugh. "Jesus, how many times did you let them wack you on the head?"

"Not my idea." A long silence. "Aw, man, Jim. Is the world still here?"

* * *

Jack came up fighting. He swung low, hoping to catch his assailant under the ribs.

Assuming it even had ribs.

A hand caught his fist to still the blow, and Carter told him sharply, "Stop it, sir. It's us. You're safe."

Jack's eyes flew open, but he couldn't see a damn thing. Just white lights in the darkness. "Daniel," he said.

"Don't fight me," Carter replied, which seemed a bizarre non sequitur to Jack. "You've been stabbed. You need medical attention."

"I'm fine," Jack muttered, trying to pull away. "Where's Daniel? That thing--" But the words wouldn't come. He couldn't even remember what he'd seen. When he tried to grasp the memory he saw instead carved figures in the moonlight, and a sound escaped him that must have sounded an awful lot like wailing, because Carter shushed him like a child and then called for Teal'c.

"I can't hold him. Can you--"

"Ease up, I got 'im." Jack recognized that voice. Wesley's friend. The black kid who'd wanted to be a pilot when he grew up. Strong arms wrapped themselves around his chest, and Carter let his hands go. Jack felt himself pulled backwards, and his weight came down on one ankle. He felt a twinge of pain and winced, expecting it to get much worse, but it didn't.

"Gunn," he said. "Is Daniel here? Can you see him?"

"Your man's right here." He eased Jack into a chair and released him. "Open your eyes and see for yourself."

Jack blinked, and for a moment he saw figures moving in the unsteady light. Teal'c had scooped Daniel up in his arms like a gangly, long-legged child. Then Carter turned her flashlight on Jack, and the glimpse was lost again in a blinding wash of light. _Teal'c and Carter are here_, he finally thought. "Report, Major," he whispered.

"Yes, sir," she said, even as she pulled his jacket off his shoulders and pushed up his shirt. "The hostiles appear to have fled or been contained. Assessing casualties now. My god, sir."

Jack tried to bat her hands away. "Not the first time you seen my abs, Major."

She ran the side of her hand along his belly, then under his rib cage. "You were stabbed, but I can't find the wound. There's blood but no entry wound."

"There won't be one." At that, Jack pushed aside Carter's flashlight and squinted upwards at the speaker. Paul Davis looked like hell, swaying on his feet, his white shirt splotched with blood, but still a damned sight better than the last time Jack had seen him. "I don't have a bullet in me anymore either."

"Colonel, Major Davis, begging your pardon," Carter protested, "but I _saw_\--"

"We all seen a lotta shit tonight," Gunn said. "Not all of it came true."

"You and Teal'c all right?" Jack asked.

"Fine, sir."

"Ethan Rayne?"

Carter swung the flashlight around. Rayne was sitting on the floor with his hands cuffed together, trying to stifle a bloody nose with a white handkerchief. He glared balefully up at the light. "You think this changes anything?" he asked in a stuffed-up voice. "Do you even _begin_ to understand what Dr. Jackson was trying to achieve?"

"Can we get him out of here?" Jack said wearily, and Teal'c hoisted the man to his feet by the scruff of his neck.

"With great pleasure."

"No religion, no magic," Ethan insisted as Teal'c hauled him away. "Just the leftover bits and pieces of aliens who never cared that mankind even existed in the first place. Who's going to hear your bedtime prayers tonight, Colonel Jack?"

"You will be silent," Teal'c said calmly. "Or I will allow Ms. Chase to strike you again."

"I appreciate the offer," Cordelia muttered. She was sitting on an ottoman, her knees together and her feet apart, the nearest thing to a graceless pose Jack had ever seen from her, shaking her right hand irritably. "But I think I broke a couple of fingers the first time."

"Help me up," Jack said, and this time Carter took one side and Gunn the other, and they walked him a few steps to the couch where Teal'c had laid Daniel to rest. Teal'c or someone had removed the blindfold, and Daniel's eyes were closed, his face peaceful in the stark white glare of Carter's flashlight. Jack sat down at the head of the sofa and felt for the pulse in Daniel's throat. His chest rose and fell in slow, regular breaths.

"He seems to be sleeping," Carter said. "That's probably the best thing for him right now."

Sleeping.

Jack thought about Daniel alone in one of the upstairs guest rooms, the bedclothes pulled up to his shoulder while someone played Irving Berlin songs in a room down the corridor.

He was waiting for Jack. And Jack would never get there now, because he was trapped here, on the other side of sleep.

He patted Daniel's cheek. "Come on, Danny-boy. Up and at 'em."

Daniel slumbered on, and Jack remembered moonlight on stone. The carvings moved, ponderous and inexorable while the gibbous moon sank beyond the cliffs, and God _damn_ Ethan Rayne to the seventh level of hell, because no, Jack didn't know who he would be praying to after tonight. Especially if Daniel didn't wake up soon. He lowered his head until his lips almost brushed Daniel's brow and told him, "Time to come back now. Coffee's on and everything." Brushing Daniel's hair back, he touched the backs of his fingers to Daniel's temple, where he could feel the heavy, slow beat of his pulse. "Seriously, Daniel," he whispered. "You're killing me here."

* * *

"So do you think we'll be able to charge the federal government for all this?"

"Right, girl," Gunn snorted. "Like the government is ever gonna admit any of this happened in the first place."

"Like they can just _deny_ it? With power out all over the city?"

"Yeah? Ask the feds what they know about deliberately engineering the AIDS virus and see what the government can deny--" Gunn broke off mid-rant, hissing in pain. "Would you watch what you're doing?"

"It's supposed to hurt," Cordelia informed him. She was washing the long cut on his chest with hydrogen peroxide, dabbing gauze left-handed while she soaked the bruised knuckles on her right hand in a bowl of ice water. "That means it's working." By the light of the kerosene lantern the dried blood on Gunn's chest looked glossy and wet.

"Almost got it," Wesley said as Angel groaned aloud. "Steady --" Another groan, and then a clink as Wesley dropped the third bullet onto a plate. Angel spat out the rolled-up wash cloth he'd been biting on.

"All right?"

Angel panted harshly and rolled his eyes up to regard Wesley. "You sure you're not in training for the Watchers' Feast?"

"The Watchers have a feast?" Cordelia asked. "How come Giles never gets invited?"

Wesley laid down the forceps and picked up the scalpel again. "Last one. Are you ready?"

"Just give me -- a minute here."

"The skin's already growing back over the bullet hole," Wesley reminded him severely. "It'll be worse the longer you wait."

"Not asking for all night," Angel snapped. "Just long enough to catch my breath."

"That won't make it any easier," Wesley answered, but his voice was gentler. He put his hand on Angel's shoulder. "By the way. Thank you for saving my life. I wouldn't have survived that many bullets in my stomach."

Angel grumbled something and looked away.

"What?"

"I owed you," Angel repeated quickly, not looking up at Wes. "Just glad I was there."

"I am too. And you don't owe me anything."

"Seriously," Cordelia said. "So we know Jack works for the Air Force, right? So we'll be sending them an invoice. And the other guys were NID? They are _definitely_ getting a bill for facilities rental. Not to mention medical expenses. What about that cop from Washington? Think we could get away with billing his precinct too?"

"His name's Jim," Wesley said. "And I still don't understand why he was here in the first place. As far as I can tell, Colonel O'Neill could practically have his pick of Air Force personnel for this -- whatever it was. This _mission._ Why involve a police detective from Cascade?"

"He could see in the dark," Angel said.

"No, it's not the cop," Gunn said. "It's the Sandburg guy with him. You folks weren't there, but Rayne was practically pissing himself, he got so excited when the NID brought Sandburg in. Going on and on about how he's some kind of heavy duty mojo man."

"Did he really?" Wesley said thoughtfully. "That almost makes sense. You know, I felt something ... I think Jack must have called Blair Sandburg, not that detective at all. I suppose Jim was just here as his bodyguard."

"Really," Angel tried again. "He could see in the dark. Pitch black, and he knew I was there."

"Put this back in your mouth," Wesley said, and proceeded to push the wadded-up cloth between Angel's teeth. "I want to finish up here and check on our guests. Perhaps Dr. Jackson has woken up by now."

"So should I send Blair Sandburg's invoice to his home address?" Cordy mused. "Or do you think Jim handles his front office, too?"

* * *

> And we read of Medea.  
>  She spake three words, which caus'd sweet sleep at will,  
>  The troubled Sea, the raging Waves stand still.
> 
> Three Books of Occult Philosopy (Agrippa, Translation by J.F.:1651)

* * *

"I was working on my own," Agent Katz repeated mildly. "The NID will confirm my letter of resignation has been on file for weeks."

"Yes, I'm sure they will," Paul Davis said, aggravated that he couldn't be nearly as calm as the agent. He was shaky with exhaustion, his chest ached with the memory of Katz's bullet, and he still had a stomach ache from that bad falafel dinner in Cascade. Surely it was more than a little unfair that fried chick peas had followed him past the end of the world. "And all the other agents who were here tonight? I take it they all have the same letter on file?"

"I don't see any other agents." Katz made a show of looking around the office. He was handcuffed to the chair with two pairs of the plastic cuffs they'd found him carrying. Detective Ellison had taken charge of his weapon and sealed it in a plastic grocery bag from the kitchen.

"We'll find your confederates. One of them will talk, whether you do or not."

Katz snorted. "You're wasting your time, Major. I was working alone."

"And Mr. Rayne?"

""The man had his own agenda."

"And that would have been what, exactly?"

Katz shrugged. "You'd have to ask him."

"What was yours?"

Paul didn't really expect an answer to that either, but after a long moment a subtle, ugly smile twisted the corner of Agent Katz's mouth. It was the same look he'd had on his face when he'd shot Paul at point blank range.

Paul wished he was the sort of person who wouldn't have hesitated to tip Katz's chair over backwards right about now.

"I'm a patriot and a soldier," the agent said at last. "When I saw the safety of this country -- of this _planet_ \--being compromised, I was honor-bound to take what steps I could to neutralize the threat."

"And you did this under the supervision of your commanding officers?"

"We've already covered this, Major. Losing our concentration, are we?"

This was why he was a diplomat, not an interrogator, Paul thought tiredly. Every taunt from Katz went zinging straight home, until Paul wanted to shoot the man with his own gun, or maybe go stand outside and cry a little bit. Mostly, though, he wanted to find a quiet corner somewhere and sleep without dreams and nightmares until dawn. The hapless actors in Ethan Rayne's play had all found bedrooms upstairs hours ago. The bare thought of laying his head down on something soft made him sway slightly in sheer exhaustion, and he sat on the edge of the desk before he fell over. "And what was this dire threat again?"

"There are none so blind," Katz murmured, still smiling.

"Fine," Paul said. "It doesn't matter whether you tell me anything or not. Obviously this operation has been in the works for months, probably ever since Dr. Jackson rejoined the SGC. The NID will have generated a paper trail a mile wide since January. They'll try to eradicate everything--I presume that's happening right now-- but this is the government. Something will slip through, and I intend to make it my business to find it. Overhead for Ethan Rayne's theater rental. Air fare to Los Angeles. Long distance phone bills. Reimbursement for the Chinese takeout someone got while surveilling Dr. Jackson's apartment. Something."

And to Paul's weary astonishment, that actually made an impression of some sort on the otherwise unflappable agent. His face darkening he said, "I really don't understand you, Major. You've actually worked with Dr. Jackson, and still you can't see who he is."

"Dr. Jackson is the archaeologist who opened the stargate. Is there something I'm missing?"

"His wife was a goa'uld. His stepson is another. According to Jackson himself, he had a vision in which the entire racial memory of the goa'uld was revealed to him. To say his loyalties are divided is an understatement. Bottom line, though, he's a diagnosed schizophrenic who should have been institutionalized with his grandfather as soon as Colonel O'Neill dragged him back from Abydos. What I can't understand is why in god's name they let him out the first time."

Paul stood up. To his surprise, he really did feel calm now. He thought it was a shame that Teal'c wasn't here to tear Katz's head from his shoulders, but maybe that was just as well.

"You're talking about the man who saved my life, Agent, after you tried to take it. I'm glad to be able to say that I do know who's going to be locked up soon, and it won't be Dr. Jackson."

"You have no right to hold me like this. You'll be the one up on charges for kidnapping and illegal imprisonment."

"Have your attorney call me," Paul said, before closing the door behind him. "Maybe we can do lunch."

* * *

Jack had tried to sleep. He'd even nodded off a few times during the night, curled up tightly around Daniel as if mere physical proximity would be enough to grant him entry once again to Daniel's dreams. So far, it hadn't been, and ever since dawn Jack been sitting awake by the bed in a guest room that reminded him so strongly of his earlier dreams that he'd been reluctant to have Daniel here at all, though the privacy of the room eventually won out over his fears.

A few hours ago he'd pulled back the curtains and opened all the windows to let in the sounds and smells of the morning after. Two of the apartment building across the street had collapsed. Timbers and masonry sprawled across the street, and it looked as though Angel's car had probably been caught in the wreckage. Jack wondered if Angel had noticed yet. No emergency personnel had shown up, and he assumed if anyone still living were trapped in the rubble, Ellison would have directed Teal'c and Carter there first. Knots of people moved in slow, dazed patterns up and down the street, trying to salvage their belongs from the wreckage or just wandering in shock, and sirens still wailed at random intervals in the distance. After a while Jack stopped watching and came back to sit by the bed.

"So anyway," he continued, reaching for Daniel's limp hand across the bedclothes and gripping it tightly. "It's a little after eleven by now, and I'm starting to notice this nagging headache. It's taken you years, but I think you've finally got me as addicted to that poisonous black brew as you are. So thanks. Thanks a lot. This is another one you owe me."

A knock came at the door and Jack started a little because this room still gave him the heebie jeebies, before pulling himself together and calling, "Come in."

Wesley stuck his head around the door and let himself in. "How's Dr. Jackson?"

What does it look like? Jack thought irritably, but that was hardly fair, so he said, "No change."

To his credit, Wesley didn't proffer any meaningless words of encouragement. He came to the bed and looked down at Daniel, who was snoring softly, his mouth hanging open. Jack didn't release his hand.

"Do you think it may be time to consider medical intervention?"

"If I thought there was a chance in hell we could actually get him treatment, I'd have taken him in hours ago," Jack said. "As it is now, he'd just be layin' on a gurney in the corridor while they took care of people with sucking chest wounds and compound fractures. He's better off here."

Wesley nodded. "I actually came to tell you that half a dozen national guardsmen just showed up and took custody of Agent Katz ."

"The national guard's been mobilized?"

"That's what they said. Angel went ahead and let them take Katz."

"What about Ethan?"

"Oh, I thought you knew. The INS came for him well before sunrise this morning."

Jack laughed bleakly. "The INS."

"They had ID."

"I'm sure they did. Did you get a chance to talk to the guardsmen about the situation? How widespread is the damage?"

"One of them said the power grid for the entire Pacific Coast is down."

"Christ." Jack shook Daniel's hand lightly. "You're missing all the excitement here, Daniel. Sounds like you and Ethan managed to bring down half the country."

Wesley smiled a tight, sad smile, and Jack looked away from him.

"You must be hungry," Wesley said. "I'd be glad to sit with Dr. Jackson if you'd like to stretch your legs, get a bite to eat. Help yourself to anything you find in the kitchen. Oh. You might want to skip the bags of, um, fluid in the refrigerator, but anything else --"

"Don't tell me."

Wesley spread his hands and didn't tell Jack what he'd already guessed.

Jack closed his eyes. You know, once upon a time his world had made a kind of sense, he was almost certain. He just couldn't remember when that might have been.

"Which reminds me," Wesley said. "How's the bite? That vampire last night got a pretty big chunk out of you."

"It's fine." Jack reflexively covered the puckered scar on his neck. "Itches a little is all. Apparently while we were together in that -- in that _place_ , I was busy sucking up Daniel's life force like a vampire myself. Fixed up my ankle, my neck, that spot under my ribs where Ethan stuck a knife in. All just a little sore and achy now. 'Course , it probably cost Daniel his _life_, but hey, as long as I'm fine, what's the problem?"

"You didn't know what was happening, and you couldn't have stopped it even if you had known."

"Ethan told me exactly what was happening, but once I got there, I didn't remember. Wesley --" Jack hesitated. One part of him couldn't believe he was about to ask this question out loud.

Then again, Wesley had just asked him with a perfectly straight face how a vampire bite was healing. So he probably wasn't in any position to judge other people's loony requests. "Wesley, you know -- stuff."

"Stuff?"

"Magic. Stuff. This craziness like Ethan was doing." Jack gestured in frustration.

"I'm not like Ethan Rayne."

"Right. I didn't mean it like that. But can you get me back into Daniel's dreams like he did?"

Comprehension dawned. "Ah."

"Can you do it?"

Wesley paced the floor. "No. I wouldn't -- I _can't_ perform a spell like that. It's too intimate, too dangerous. I could end up trapping your soul outside your body. I -- No. I'm sorry."

"But it is possible."

"It's possible," Wesley agreed unhappily.

"Then help me find someone who will."

"Jack, I don't think you understand what you're asking."

"What I understand is that Daniel is lurking somewhere inside his own head and either can't or won't come out, so I have to go in there and get him. He kept trying to push me out the door, you know, telling me he'd catch up later, but God, I know the little bastard better than that. He was never intending to follow me at all."

Wesley looked at him for a long time, obviously trying to reach a decision. "There's a young woman in Sunnydale who's shown an enormous aptitude ... but Jack, she's very young, and I don't know how disciplined. It would be a terrible risk for all of you."

"Sunnydale? Just north of here? OK. Let's go. Angel's Plymouth is toast, by the way. Do you have a car?"

"Wait. Wait." Wesley made slow-down motions with both hands. "Let me think a minute. There might be a better way."

* * *

Blair knocked on the door with his free hand and then let himself in. He was feeling lost and ridiculous, so he held out the coffee cup like a shield. "Angel made a fresh pot. I thought you could use some."

Colonel O'Neill lifted his head. The light from the open window was behind him, a dull, filtered brightness as the smoke from a hundred fires around the city smothered the sunlight. "Thank you." He released Daniel's hand to stand up and take the cup from Blair. "Hey. You're not looking so hot there. Sit down."

Blair let the man guide him to a chair, although he was thinking that Colonel O'Neill wasn't in such great shape himself. The shadows under his eyes looked like bruises, and there was a definite tremor in the hand that lifted the coffee cup to his lips. He took a long drink and then smiled thinly at Blair. "Didn't realize how much I needed that."

"Yeah," Blair agreed. "Just something about that first sip in the morning after the end of the world."

There was a flicker in Colonel O'Neill's dark eyes. "Looks to me like the world's still here."

"Right." Blair ran his hands back and forth over the tops of his jeans. "Look. Wesley has this crazy idea that I can -- I don't know what the guy's been smoking, but I've gotta tell you, I'm not what he thinks I am. I don't know how to help Daniel. I'm sorry. My honest opinion is that we should try to find a hospital that can give him an MRI. Anything else is just way, _way_ outta my league."

O'Neill nodded. The tight, thin smile returned for an instant. "Yeah. Don't really know what I was thinking myself. Hang around the likes of Wesley and Angel too long and you start to hope everything has some sort of damned magical solution."

"Last night was crazier than I ever want to see again," Blair said. "Knowing that things can get that far out of wack, it's tough to go back to taking the mundane world for granted."

"Yeah. You're right about that. So will you try?"

Blair squeezed his eyes shut. "I just _told_ you--"

"I don't know how to help him," Colonel O'Neill said, his voice raw, like a man trying to hold back tears. Or one who would never be able to shed them. "Please."

So even though Blair knew perfectly well this was crazy and pointless, in the end he toed off his shoes and crawled onto the bed, settling himself into a comfortable half-lotus at the foot of the bed next to Daniel, who lay on his back with his face turned to the side. The diffuse sunlight made him look younger than his years, and to tell the truth, his face was the only peaceful one Blair had seen all day. Maybe they ought to just let him sleep.

But Blair looked at Colonel O'Neill's expression one last time before closing his eyes, and didn't say that out loud.

He tried to clear his mind by focusing on his breathing, since it was the only thing he could think to do, but extraneous thoughts kept pinging around his head. He thought about Jim, somewhere out there in the city, and hoped that everyone he found would be alive and well. He wished he had kissed Jim before letting him leave last night.

He thought about his Monday classes, which he was probably going to miss. Heaven only knew when he and Jim would be able to get back to Cascade. Would Rainier even be open on Monday?

And had the world really come that close to ending? All Blair could remember clearly was that crazed NID agent smashing his ear against his head with the muzzle of his gun. His ear still hurt. He'd kept meaning to take out the earrings, which were probably bent and damaged, but somehow in all his pointless wandering around this morning he'd never gotten around to it.

And knowing Colonel O'Neill was watching him, he didn't want to reach up and fiddle with the earrings _now_. He tried not to think about it, with the inevitable result that he slowly became completely obsessed with his aching ear. He thought about jagged, twisty little gold wires digging their way crookedly across flesh until he couldn't stand it any more, and simply had to reach up and pull them out. A hand gently touched his own, and without opening his eyes, Blair turned his palm to drop the earrings into Colonel O'Neill's hand. His ear lobe stung sharply for a few moments, and he felt a drop or two of blood, but then the pain began to fade, and with it went his awareness of the rest of his body, from his throbbing head to the slight ache in his hips. He'd been sadly out of practice of late.

_Great_, he though fuzzily. _Now I'm falling asleep,_ and he felt badly for Colonel O'Neill -- for Jack, the man's name was _Jack_ \-- looking for miracles from someone who apparently couldn't even attempt meditation for more than fifteen minutes or so without dozing off

Blair had to admit, though, it was a funny kind of sleep. He was aware of the people outside on the street, their voices reaching him as clearly as if they were here in the room with him. So many frightened, unhappy people, grieving for the loss of their homes, for their loved ones. Still in shock from the night of visions and nightmares.

And he was aware of the sun moving across the sky even though he couldn't see it though the smog and smoke. (And besides, he thought, his eyes were closed.)

He knew when Jim got back to the hotel, hours later, he and Sam Carter and Teal'c all too exhausted to worry about the fragile nature of the universe and unspeakable gods from beyond the stars. So tired that when Wesley told Jim vaguely that Blair was upstairs sitting with Jack and Daniel, Jim accepted it without question and asked if this place had gas water heaters, because he'd been dreaming about a hot shower all day. Blair smiled at that, relieved, and turned around to look down the hill towards the park bench where Daniel sat alone, throwing a tennis ball to a chocolate brown retriever. _About damned time,_ Blair thought to himself , and jogged down the hill to meet him.

"Hey!" he called. "Dr. Jackson! Daniel!"

Daniel gently pried the sopping tennis ball out of the dog's mouth and threw it again for her. She spun out after the ball, her feet kicking up gravel as she tore across the walk. Only then did Daniel look in his direction. "Blair?"

"Of course it's me! Good grief, have you been here all this time? Everyone's out looking for you. Jack's about to go nuts."

The dog came galloping back happily and tried to present the tennis ball to Blair, and when he didn't respond quickly enough, nosed the ball into Daniel's lap instead. "Good girl," Daniel said, though when he tried to take the ball himself, she wrenched her head away and went trotting off with her tail in the air, the ball clamped in her jaws. Blair wondered if any humans ever lived up to her playing-catch standards.

"I've been right here," Daniel finally said. "I didn't know anyone was looking."

"Well, surprise, they are. You ready to go?"

"I don't think so," Daniel said. "Things ... haven't worked out so well. I thought maybe this time-- You know, I'm just going to hang out here for a while. I think Sha'uri will be around soon."

"Who's Sha'uri?"

Daniel turned his face away without answering.

"Daniel? I'm serious. Who's Sha'uri?"

"Tell Jack I'm fine, would you?" Daniel got up and began walking away. Blair scurried to catch up, feeling the cold weight of foreboding in his  
chest.

"I don't think he's going to buy that from me. You'd better come tell him yourself."

Daniel raised a hand in dismissal and refused to meet Blair's eye. "Jack worries. It's part of his job."

"Part of his _job_? Do you even hear yourself? The guy's tearing himself to pieces over you."

Daniel stopped. "Sam and Teal'c love Jack. They love him so much. They'll take care of him, and he'll be all right." He sounded to Blair like he was trying to convince himself. "Just make him believe that I'm OK."

"I can't do that, man. What's up with you? What are you running away from this time?"

"I'm not running," Daniel said. "I'm just not going back."

"What are you talking about, 'not going back'?"

Daniel finally turned. "Would you?"

And at that, the green of the grass on the hill was overrun with twining flowers, and the sky grew angles and corners. They were back in the hotel room with the ghastly carpet and the dark walls, Blair thought, relieved. Apparently they'd been gone for hours because the room was dark, the curtains drawn, and Jack was nowhere to be seen.

Come to think of it, he didn't see Daniel either. Blair turned nervously, beginning to suspect things were not exactly what they seemed, and heard a muffled sound on the other side of the bed. His heart thumping in his chest, he slowly rounded the bed, one reluctant step after another. A table lamp cast a sickly yellow light through the ancient paper shade.

There was nothing on the floor but a wadded bundle of sheets and blankets. Blair let out the breath he'd been holding, just as he noticed the spreading stain on the sheets.

Something within the bundle twitched. A bare foot, streaked with winding black trails like spilled ink, protruded from under the blanket.

For an instant horror froze Blair in his place, but then he dropped to his knees and began to peel back the sheets. His hands shook as he uncovered Daniel's face. "Don't -- don't try to move," he whispered hoarsely. "I'll get help."

Daniel's head turned blindly in the direction of Blair's voice. "Don't tell Jack," he pleaded. There were more black trails running across his face, spilling from his eye sockets like tears. "Don't let him know it was like this."

"Oh my god," Blair had begun rocking involuntarily. "Oh god, Daniel. Just lie still." He pulled the sheet back further and found his body split the length of his spine, and instead of flesh and blood and bone there was nothing but darkness spilling in gouts, pooling amongst the folds of the blankets and then washing blackly across the floor.

He didn't think about what he did next. He simply yanked away the blankets and pulled Daniel into his arms, cradling his body tightly against his own.

"No--" Daniel tried to fight free, but he didn't have the strength.

"Hush," Blair whispered, his hand cupped around the back of Daniel's head. "You fixed up Jack and Major Davis. God, Daniel, you held _everything_ together until Ethan's spell broke. You've got to let me help you now."

Daniel shook his head mutely, but he couldn't fight anymore. "It's all right," Blair said. "I promise, everything's going to be fine." He had no business making a promise like that, but saying the words out loud kept him from panicking when it began to hurt.

The ache bloomed under his breastbone and swept outwards like wings. The pain was the flat void he had seen in his nightmares, and it had turned suddenly, unspeakably intimate. The shock of desecration made him weep. He buried his head against Daniel's shoulder and locked his arms tight around Daniel's ruined back. As emptiness gouged him, Blair began to slough apart, collapsing into the vacuum. He wondered how Daniel had held himself together for so long. This was worse than death, which in Blair's experience was a crowded, complicated affair. This was his soul spitted by nothingness more vast than universes.

Blair howled until his trachea burst like a shotgun barrel, and that was when Daniel pushed him aside and clumsily freed himself.

"Stop," he panted to Blair. "Stop. You'll go too far."

Blair flailed a moment more until he realized he and Daniel were once more on the hillside in the park, sprawled side by side in the grass while the chocolate brown retriever watched them with with big, serious eyes. She still had the tennis ball in her mouth, and drool was running down her jaw.

"What do you say we split the difference?" Daniel whispered hoarsely. "Then maybe we can both go home."

Blair nodded, not trusting himself to speak, and when Daniel reached out his hand, Blair took it and held on tight. Daniel tugged at Blair, and Blair struggled to follow, and when he opened his eyes, he was still sitting in a half lotus at the foot of Daniel's bed. He felt very, very calm, and very, very still and he wondered if he had just died after all. He didn't move for fear the slightest jolt would dislodge his spirit and send him floating to the ceiling.

Daniel's eyes were open, and after a little while Jack reached down and smoothed the tears from his face. "Hey."

Blair didn't hear his response, but Jack whispered, "Yeah, it's me," and then, "Aw, hey, easy." He curled forward to touch his forehead to Daniel's, and then bent down to lay his head over Daniel's heart.

Blair carefully straightened one leg. Encouraged by his failure to immediately begin drifting ceilingward, he crawled off the bed. His toes tingling as the blood started to flow again, he limped to the door. He heard Jack say, "Sandburg," as he put his hand on the doorknob, and he answered automatically, "I'm good, I'm good," before he let himself out.

Wesley was lurking in the corridor, and he hurried up to catch Blair as he stumbled. "Are you all right? What happened?"

"Daniel's here. I'm good. It's all good," He clutched Wesley's forearm with both hands as his knees buckled, and Wesley maneuvered him quickly to the  
wall.

"Careful. You need to sit down. Put your head down if you feel like you're going to faint."

Blair didn't argue. He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, which was just about the time Jim came bursting out of the stairwell like a madman. "Sandburg! _Christ_, what the hell are you _doing_?" He was shirtless and barefoot, still wet from the shower. Blair looked up at him and had to smile.

"Nothing, man. Everything's fine."

Jim probably didn't believe that, but he calmed down at once, crouching beside Blair and reaching his hand out to lay his palm against the side of his head. "What the hell are you up to, Chief?" His voice was terribly gentle. "I heard --"

"Just thinking," Blair said. God, he was tired. He had to concentrate to stay awake long enough to finish his sentences.

"Thinking?"

"This going to the grocery store at six a.m. I'm not sure that's really going to work out for me after all."

Jim stared at him. "No problem," he finally said. His voice cracked, and his eyes were red and smudged-looking. "I told you I could go on Thursdays."

Blair felt relieved enough to cry, too. That six-in-the-morning thing had been _nuts_. He reached clumsily for Jim, and he came at once, pulling Blair forward and wrapping his arms around his back "That's right, you did tell me," he muttered into Jim's big shoulder. He turned his head and allowed himself to relax against Jim's warm, slightly damp bulk, and it was as good as coming home again. "I remember now. You did."

* * *

The last of the blood supplies in the fridge had all spoiled by the end of the second day without electricity. Angel used what was left to fertilize the bird-of-paradise growing in crumbling concrete planters around the fountain, and then went hunting.

He returned a little after midnight, no longer hungry but hardly satisfied, and almost immediately ran into one of his stranded house guests. Jim Ellison was carrying a heaping plate of peanut butter crackers and a mug of powered hot cocoa up the stairs.

"Are those for Blair?" Angel asked.

The first smile Angel had ever seen from the man spread across Ellison's face. "He woke up ravenous a little while ago," he said happily. "Told me if I tried to force-feed him any more chicken soup he'd start growing feathers."

"He's probably safe enough. I don't think there's any more canned soup in the cabinet."

"No." Ellison grimaced. "Look, thanks for letting us eat you out of house and home."

"Don't thank me. I'm pretty sure Cordy's keeping a running tab."

"Jack heard the Red Cross will be opening up food distribution centers by the end of the week. All the canned green beans and five-pound blocks of American cheese we can eat." Ellison suddenly broke off. His nose twitched and he looked sharply at Angel. "_Pigeons_?"

Angel spread his hands and shrugged.

"How in --"

"Well, actually it's not that hard. Once you find them roosting, you can just scoop them up by the armload."

Jim still looked uncertain. Or maybe a little appalled.

"Oh, believe me," Angel hastened to reassure him. "They make a much better dinner than rats."

* * *

Let the red dawn surmise  
What we shall do,  
When this blue starlight dies  
And all is through.

> Robert W Chambers: "The Yellow Sign" from _The King in Yellow_ (1895)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Kitty and Dasha for holding my hand all the way through, and for everyone who read this story in progress and **also** held my hand, assuring me every time I started to get the fantods that of _course_ they were still reading, and of **course** they were still interested and no **way** was this dragging on too long. They may well have been lying, but I believed them, and that's what really counts.


End file.
